Category Archives: HR Technology

Talent Acquisition’s Digital Disruption

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I’m headed out to Park City, UT on June 1st to be part of HireVue’s first ever Digital Disruption 2014.  Semi-User Conference, Semi HR Tech Trends Conference, one of the more intriguing agendas filled with practitioners from across industry.  The keynote will be the famous Moneyball guy Billy Beane – remember the Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill movie about baseball and selection metrics, that Billy Beane.  He was really the first guy to bring selection metrics to the forefront of what we in Talent Acquisition now use daily.   He did it to get the best baseball team possible, using the smallest payroll possible, to stay competitive in a world of competition willing to spend whatever it took.  Sound familiar to your own industry!?

I’m looking forward to seeing him talk, again.  The first time I ever saw Billy speak was the day after the Oscars when Moneyball, and it’s actors, were up for a number of awards.  He had great stories from that, plus his normal presentation on metrics.  That was a few years ago.  Things have evolved, as has the emphasis of everyone now using the same metrics.  So, now what?  What do you do when those who have more money than you, now are also using your metrics as well?  My guess is you get back to strategy and culture, and make sure you follow it, like crazy!  It should be very interesting.

On a side note, ERE recently released their annual ‘State of Recruiting‘ study.  You know what they found out?  You don’t like to be called ‘Recruiting’.  In fact, the majority of you prefer to be called ‘Talent Acquisition’.  Did you know that?  It’s uncomfortable to me.  I like to shorten everything.  I like to simplify.  So, going from one word to describe something, to two words to describe something, seems totally ridiculous!  I can’t tell you how much of a pet peeve this is to me.  It’s like when someone named “David” or “Michael” demands you call them by their full name instead of “Dave” and “Mike”.  I hate those guys!  What do you mean you want me to use two syllables when I can only use one!  I demand efficiency!

My guess is people who do this type of business for a living, on the corporate side, felt like they needed two words to keep up with Human Resources.  “Well, if they have two words in their department name, we need to words in our name as well!”  No one would admit this, but in reality, it’s how this stupid stuff happens.  There is actually nothing wrong with calling Recruiting, Recruiting.  HR use to be ‘Personnel’, but had to change it because ‘Personnel’ just didn’t encapsulate what ‘we’ really did.  Now, even ‘Human Resources’ is coming under fire from progressives because we shouldn’t think of our employees, our people, as ‘Resources’.  They are People!  So, you get these ridiculous titles like Chief People Officer and VP of People.

I hear you Recruiters.  I know you want to be all big and fancy and “Talent Acquisition” seems so much more big and fancy…  But you aren’t kidding anyone.  You’re still a recruiter.  You’re not ‘acquiring talent’, you’re putting asses in seats.  Get over yourself, and get back on the phone.

I only bring this up because when I’m in Utah with the HireVue folks, I’ll be rubbing elbows with many ‘Talent Acquisition’ Pros.  Talking about all the new cool trends in, well, Talent Acquisition (a little part of me just died).   I think what Billy Beane will all remind of, though, is that while technology and analytics can disrupt any industry, you still need to have great vision, solid strategy and the courage to follow through with your plan.

My guess is that hasn’t changed as much as we like to change what we call ourselves!

Profiling Diversity Hires

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Entelo, a recruiting technology company, recently launched a product called Entelo Diversity. To be honest, I had to look up what Entelo actually did.  I had heard the name, but I couldn’t have told you if they were an employee engagement company or an ATS – turns out they’re neither! They’re a recruiting play, inasmuch, you have needs that are hard to find, their product claims to help you find those needs (I’ve never used it, so I not telling you it works or doesn’t).  This new product, apparently, helps you find Black People! Or Women. Or Black Women. Or a half Black-Asain Women, who used to be a man. I’m not sure, for sure, I haven’t used it, I’m just going on their press release.

Here’s what I know, that most Talent and HR people lose their freaking minds over.  It’s not a bad thing to have a product or service that can specifically find you a certain kind of diversity.  I know. I know. That makes you really uncomfortable!

“TIM! People will use those products to discriminate!”

They might.  I can’t stop that at your organization.  I can stop that at my organization!

The products just find what you want.  If you need more female recruits for your hiring pool. Bam!  A product like this will help you.  If you need more shades of color within your organization. Bam! A product like this could help you build a rainbow in your organization.  If you have a hiring manager who only wants to hire young white guys in your organization. You need to address that!  But don’t blame a recruiting product.  You own that one!

I hear the same criticism every time I show a new group how to recruit on Facebook.  There are really cool options where you could search on females, 22 years old to 28 years old, who graduated with an engineering degree from Stanford. That’s is awesome, right!?   I need more young female engineers from Standford in my engineering department! But I can also search 31-45 year old white male engineers from Stanford as well.  Oh, well, that’s not so good, right?  Wrong.  What if your entire staff was black female engineers!  While highly unlikely, you would still need to add some diversity to that staff.

This isn’t about tools getting more powerful and precise to what you are looking for.  This is about those using those tools, usually Talent and HR Pros, ensuring that your organization is doing the right things to get the best hiring pools possible.  Too many Talent and HR Pros run away from using these tools, and it only shows their own ignorance for what true diversity and inclusion is.

Smart Talent and HR Pros know what their organizations are lacking, and they’ll work to fill those needs with the best available talent.  Sometimes that means you need to get very specific on the diversity side.  Sometimes it means you don’t.  Great Pros work to always have the correct balance for their organization, their demographic and their stakeholders.

(Editor’s Note: Ha! That’s funny, you all know I don’t have an editor.  Just so we are clear, Entelo did not compensate me for this post, but if they want to send me Diet Mt. Dew, I never turn that down.)

7 Ways Recruiters Can Reinvent Themselves

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It’s that time of the month!  No, not that time – a better more enjoyable time!  It’s the FOT monthly webinar!   This month FOT will be doing Recruiter Makeovers and giving Recruiters 7 ways they can reinvent themselves as Marketers!  As always it’s FREE and comes with HRCI credit for all those SHRMies.

We know – you’re feeling stale as a recruiter. We get it, that’s why we’re partnering with Jobvite for the May FOT webinar – The Recruiter Makeover – 7 Ways Recruiters Can Reinvent Themselves as Marketers. The world’s full of great products/services that became commodities, and unfortunately, there’s a lot of recruiters in danger of becoming commodities if they don’t change with the times. Odds are you feel the shift under your feet – great candidates are less responsive than ever to average recruiters, which means you have to become a more effective marketer of the brand and opportunities you represent to keep your closing rate high.

If you’re still reading, that means you haven’t been average in the past. Join us for this FOT webinar and we’ll give you the roadmap for a career makeover that includes the following goodies:

—The Ugly “Before” Picture – We’ve all seen the “before” pictures used in makeovers and this one is no different. Using your “average joe/jane” recruiter, we’re going to take a snapshot of the recruiter most in need of our makeover. Brace yourself, because “before” pictures in makeover workups all look like mug/prison shots of Lindsay Lohan, right?

—Trendspotting 101 – We can’t start prescribing the skill equivalent of makeup or liposuction for recruiters until we tell you about the trends that are causing the need for the makeover. Candidates have more options and messages flowing to them than ever before. Whether its the emergence of Indeed, Glassdoor, LinkedIn or the social recruiting scene, recruiting is morphing into marketing. We’ll compare and contrast some of the trends to tell you why recruiters are evolving into marketers even as they keep their core recruiting skills strong.

—7 Ways Recruiters Can Reinvent Themselves As Marketers – Makeover time. We’ll hit you with our list of things you can do to reinvent yourself as a marketer who just happens to recruit for a living. You can do this. Don’t believe the naysayers that will say this is hype. Those people are just trying to keep you average.

—Our Top 5 List of Recruiters Who Have Strong Marketing Game – It’s all empty talk until we give you examples, right? The FOT crew will break down our top 5 list of recruiters who have added the marketing toolkit to their games, complete with emphasis of which of our “7 Ways” list they specialize in. Everyone in the world needs role models – even recruiters. We’ll tell you who to connect with and emulate to become a marketer in the recruiting game.

Evolving your game as a recruiter isn’t easy – it takes thought, expertise and time you don’t have, because you’re busy filling positions. Join us for the May FOT Webinar and we’ll show you how to add marketing chops to your personal recruiting brand so you don’t get left behind.

CLICK HERE IF YOU’RE A SMART TALENT PRO!

5 Ways Mobile Recruiting is Morphing Candidate Behavior

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From my buddy Kris Dunn at The HR Capitalist and Fistful of Talent – The FOT Webinar Series presents the ins and outs of Mobile Recruiting – check it out!

 

I love it (I know you do too…) when companies start talking about how they block specific types of websites to prevent employees from doing certain things.  One of the types of sites companies love to block is career sites.  ”You’re not going to look for a job while you’re working.”

 

You’re right, boss.  We won’t look for a job on your laptop while we’re working for “the man.” But we’ll absolutely wear it out on breaks, lunch and as soon as we leave work with our mobile device.  Heck – we’ll probably do  it at work from our mobile device as well.

 

That reality means you should probably figure out what’s going on with mobile recruiting, right?  That’s why the latest installment of the FOT webinar series is all about candidate behavior on mobile.  Join Ed Newman from iMomentous and Kris on Tuesday, April 1st from 3-4pm EST for Happy Hour Job Search: Driving the Behavior of Mobile Job Seekers, and we’ll hit you with the following:

 

– A complete breakdown of the basic demographics and behaviors of mobile job seekers, with strategies on how to use that data to influence candidate behavior.

 

– Inside information about power users of mobile career sites, including the level of education they’ve achieved, years of work experience and most prevalent zodiac sign (we’re kidding about the last one–but it would be cool if Capricorns were the most mobile savvy, right?).

 

– What behavior and life patterns surrounding mobile use cause employers to see spikes at particular hours of the day from mobile, and how that impacts your mobile recruiting strategy.

 

– The impact of mobile friendly career sites and email campaigns to click through rates from mobile candidates.

 

– Then, we’ll show you how all the factors listed above make providing highly relevant content and calls to action the key to success with mobile candidates.

 
A winning recruiting strategy starts with understanding the candidate you’re seeking. Where is your candidate sitting at the moment they choose to hit “apply?” What are they doing 10 seconds before they land on your site?

 

Odds are they’re on a mobile device.

 

Remember how your parents thought the Internet was a fad? Don’t fall into the same trap with mobile recruiting.  Join Ed Newman and Kris on Tuesday, April 1st from 3-4pm EST for Happy Hour Job Search: Driving the Behavior of Mobile Job Seekers, and we’ll hit you with the best strategies to get the most out your mobile recruiting strategy in 2014 and beyond.

It’s Criminal Not To Recruit Your Competition’s Talent!

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If I get 100 Talent Acquisition Pros in a room (no this isn’t going to be a dead lawyer joke) and ask them if it is ‘ethical’ to recruit each others employees, about half will say ‘No’. In fact, there are even a number who will say, “we have an agreement to not recruit from each other”! I’ve heard this, out in the open, with no restraint. It’s normal practice in the corporate world. It’s very common to hear inside Talent Acquisition departments say they don’t ‘actively’ recruit from each other because they’ve been told not to by their executives. That type of conversation will soon be a thing of the past, although, I doubt highly the activity will be!

From SHRM on the highly publicized lawsuit of many of Silicon Valley’s largest tech companies who ‘conspired’ to not recruit employees from each other:

“From 2005 to 2009, the leaders of Northern California’s largest and most powerful companies agreed to reduce competition for workers by entering into an interconnected web of secret, bilateral agreements not to solicit—‘cold call’—each other’s workforces,” the plaintiffs allege.

“By shielding their employees from waves of recruiting, defendants not only avoided individual raises, they also avoided having to make across-the-board pre-emptive increases to compensation,” the plaintiffs claim.

Agreements among the companies to refrain from the common recruiting practice of cold-calling each other’s employees deprived workers of information regarding pay packages that they could have used to find higher-paying work or to negotiate for higher salaries with their existing employers, according to the lawsuit.”

That’s right Talent Acquisition Pros it’s actually illegal to say you won’t actively recruit from your competition because you’ve agreed between each other not do it.   I get it, I get why you do this.  Having a hot job market and constantly taking talent and losing to each other seems like a never ending treadmill of work, but that’s the life of a Recruiter.  You know there are ways to stop this from happening.  Pay better.  Engage better.  Develop talent better. Have a vision that is real and share it.  It’s the age old business conundrum, do you want to pay on the front side or the back side.  Reactionary companies end up paying on the back side – more money in wages to attract talent because they turnover people who leave for better companies, more wages, etc.  It eventually catches up.

Other companies pay up front and keep their talent by paying at market or above, then constantly evaluating the market and changing pay whenever it’s needed without having employees ask, or have to leave to get paid fairly.  They develop talent from within and spend the money to do it right, giving themselves an internal pipeline.  They make sure to only allow people into leadership positions who are engaging and visionary.  It’s a lot of work, and costs money, but in the end it’s still cheaper and you have a better company.

I would actually love to see legislation that makes it illegal if you’re a corporate recruiter and you don’t make cold calls to recruit!  You saying you’re a ‘Recruiter’ but you don’t actually recruit!   That’s the real criminal activity going on!

The Mt. Rushmore of HR and Talent Bloggers

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I’m a sports geek and recently the sports talk shows and Twitter have been blowing up over The Mt. Rushmore of the NBA.  This happened because Lebron James came out and said he wants to be on the Mt. Rushmore of the NBA when his career is done.  His current NBA Mt. Rushmore is: Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird and Oscar Robinson.  The reality is, is had no bearing on anything, but people love to argue the concept!  Why Oscar? What about Russell or Wilt?! Wouldn’t you put Lebron on it right now!? It’s a never ending argument that sports geeks, like me, love to have.

The Mt. Rushmore got me to thinking about my own world and the Mt. Rushmore of HR and Talent Bloggers.  People can start the argument with just the title! Why not just HR? Aren’t those two separate mountains!?  I don’t think so. While there are thousands of bloggers in the space, I don’t differentiate the two, because to me Talent is part of the HR function, not a separate thing (although I do think it will be out of HR in the future!).

So, here is my Mt. Rushmore of HR and Talent Bloggers:

– Kris Dunn – Mostly HR, writes every freaking day for the past 5+ years at the HR Capitalist and Fistful of Talent, has great opinions on topics, ties in pop culture, sports, politics, etc. He entertains and educates. First and foremost he is and has been an actual practitioner in the field – he has gotten his hands dirty cleaning up after an employee picnic, had to do I-9 audits, design hiring processes, facilitate on-boarding and open enrollment meetings. KD knows your world and knows how to give you information to help you get better at what you do.

 – Jessica Merrill-Miller – Jessica is one of the few HR blogger types who has actually made this a paying career.  Also a one-time real HR person, over the past few years she now only blogs and consults, but is a content machine with great opinions, and super helpful advice to HR pros, candidates and leadership alike.  JMM loves this stuff!  In fact, I would put money down that if you made JMM chose between Blogging4Jobs.com (her website) and her husband, it would be a quick divorce! You feel her passion when you read her stuff and go to her site.  Everyone wants to make money blogging, but no one puts in the time and effort that JMM does.

 – Glen Cathey – Many will know Glen by his site Boolean Blackbelt.  Glen gets recruiting and sourcing at a completely different level than 99.9% of people in this industry, and that isn’t an exaggeration!  While some will be intimidated by his writing – it can get technical – the information he provides is more valuable than a Master’s degree in HR.  Also, he does have a beginners guide to get people started, and he loves to use screen shots of what he’s doing to help visual learners.  Of all the people I read, Glen puts the most effort into his posts. Super detailed, great research, it’s like my own personal training guide on how to find talent better and faster – and he just keeps delivering!  Glen is also a working Talent pro – so he’s giving you real, live up-to-date stuff. Not something he did 10 years ago and is still trying to sell as relevant.

 – Laurie Ruettimann – While LFR is currently on blogging hiatus, or sabbatical, or vacation, it really doesn’t matter – she’s the queen of HR blogging.  No one is more opinionated and spot on, usually, with those opinions.  That’s why I love her writing – she can make me laugh and not like her all in the same post.  That’s what a great blogger does, she challenges the way you think.  LFR is the also the only HR/Talent blogger I know who can talk about her bathroom habits and have a thousand people comment. She’s got a great audience and the HR folks love to read her take on things.  She the prototypical anti-HR lady, who was an HR lady, lady.  She’s a CHRO, who decided not to be a CHRO.  For those who need a LFR fix – she has a Tumbler, or you can read her years of content still up at The Cynical Girl.  

People always want to know who I read – it’s these four consistently.  I also read all the folks at Fistful, I think they’re all great as well.  Who would be on your Mt. Rushmore of HR and Talent Bloggers?

 

How Technology Saved Recruiting

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This is a rebuttal post to an article on Forbes.com by Liz Ryan titled “How Technology Killed Recruiting“.  For those of you who don’t Liz she is a media personality who use to work in HR back in 1997 for Fortune 500 companies, which might speak to her viewpoints about recruiting and technology.  Liz writes a ton of HR and Recruiting type articles for publications that wouldn’t give me the time of day (Forbes, Huffington Post, Harvard Business Review, etc.), so clearly she is respected.  That is why I decided to react to her article.  She has a huge stage and gets thousands of clicks, so I was perplexed at this attack on corporate recruiting that really has no true basis in 2014.

Liz feels that Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) have killed recruiting.  She feels all corporate recruiters do is set a never-ending string of hoops for applicants to jump through, until they are eventually lost in the black hole of a corporate recruiting abyss.  I do think this thought process has merit, 10-15 years ago.  When ATS software first came onto the market they were clearly selling to the corporate HR marketplace.  I can clearly remember sitting in process meetings with ATS vendors and having them show us (corporate HR) how they could make our life easier.  Need more screening of applicants? No problem we can put them through the ropes and only the best will get through!  Then they show you a process flow chart with 67 steps and the rest was history – Liz’s story above.

Today, ATS vendors look at the process completely different (Note: I don’t sell ATS software now, or ever! But I have purchased and implemented 5 systems in my career.).  Now, corporate HR needs the ATS to provide talent fast.  It’s about fewer clicks – how does an applicant let you know they have interest in “1” step, not 67.  Once the talent is ‘sourced’, corporate recruiting can then take them through as many filters as needed to ensure a great hire is made.  This is fairly common practice in the last 10 years of ATS implementations.  Can you still find companies that don’t get this? Yes.  But it’s not the norm in corporate recruiting with today’s ATS. Dare I say ATS vendors asked to set up a 67 step process would probably back out of the deal and refer that customer to their competition, because that will not be a customer you will ever make happy!

Here is why Liz and those who support her argument still carry around this notion of an ATS being a ‘black hole’ for your resume (BTW – I’m wondering when the last time Liz even applied for a job online?).  Candidates make excuses when they are not chosen.  “I applied! And I was perfect for ‘that’ job! But I never heard back.”  I know this because I’ve been the leader of corporate recruiting departments in the last 10 years.  I’ve heard this exact line coming from the cousin of our CEO.  I then had to show our CEO, in fact, three carefully crafted communications that his cousin received from our ATS system as the hiring processes proceeded over two weeks.

Technology hasn’t killed recruiting.  Technology has decreased the time it takes HR to recruit great talent. Technology has increased our retention rates and decreased new hire turnover by giving us better data on which to base our hiring decisions.  Technology has allowed recruiting to be brand ambassadors to our organizations. Technology has allowed most corporate recruiting departments to do ten times more, with the exact same staff it had 10 years ago.  Technology has allowed our employees to be an integral part of our recruiting function by automating employee referral programs. Technology has increased applicant response times by showing us exactly who in our organizations is holding up the process.  Technology has allowed us to fish in candidate pools that, previously, were never possible. Technology moved recruitment out of HR and into one of the most valuable functions an organization can have.

If people are your most important resource.  Your organizations ability to recruit talent, becomes critical to your organizations success. Technology help do that for recruiting. But I don’t write for Forbes, so what do I know.

 

Work Clothes That Measure Your Performance

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One of the big things that came out of the CES 2014 technology show is wearable technology.  We already are aware of wearable technology like Google Glass and various bracelets that do everything from working as your smartphone to measuring if your fat butt is moving enough.  I think what CES did this year, though, was to stretch our imagination to what could wearable technology become.

Here’s my idea – work clothes that measure whether or not you’re on task or doing exactly what you should be doing.

Think about that for a second:

1. All employees must wear company issued ‘uniform’

2. Company issued uniform has integrated wearable fibers that not only measure movements, but also give you the exact time and location of said uniform, measure the health of the worker, measure the interactions with worker tools, etc. (Hello Big Brother!)

3. Your systems measure everything to the point you can tell which employee is the most productive, which employee takes too many bathroom breaks, which employee said they were going to deliver a load to a client but also decided to stop and have a refreshing adult beverage on the way.

4. Not only measuring performance and output, but also relaying exact ways that an employee can get better at their job. “Tim continues to drop his arm down to his side after every motion “X”, if Tim would keep his arm at a 45 degree angle he would get 14% more output” – now that is some serious specific feedback!

5. Wearable uniforms could also reduce workplace accidents.  If the clothes new the operator was getting too clothes to a dangerous situation, or forgot to put down a safety gate, the clothes could shut down the system before an accident could happen. That’s really cool!

6. Wearable technology could measure the health of your workers, and deliver warning signs to HR. Have you ever had someone die of a heart attack at your place of business?  I have. It sucks really, really bad to see a coworker die.

Some of this seems Star Wars, super techy, fantasy kinds of things, but it’s not.  Technology is getting very close to begin doing some these things in the next years.  While some will think of these things as intrusive to their privacy, I’m guessing companies and worker’s compensation insurance companies will not.  You want this great job, with great pay and benefits, at our great company, please put on this company issues uniform.

It’s not about control. It’s about becoming better, faster.  For all the training we do, nothing could get folks up to speed, with 100% compliance, faster than your shirt not allowing to continue to do a work around that is dangerous and delivers a less than quality product.

What do you think?  Would you wear clothes that measured everything you do in your job?

 

 

Your Open Office is Killing Your Productivity

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You know what’s funny – everyone, who is anyone, wants to work in a new, cool, ultra modern open office concept!  Organizations are spending billions creating these environments, and now studies are coming out and showing that productivity suffers in open concepts, especially with younger workers and those that love to multitask. From the New Yorker:

The open office was originally conceived by a team from Hamburg, Germany, in the nineteen-fifties, to facilitate communication and idea flow. But a growing body of evidence suggests that the open office undermines the very things that it was designed to achieve…In 2011, the organizational psychologist Matthew Davis reviewed more than a hundred studies about office environments. He found that, though open offices often fostered a symbolic sense of organizational mission, making employees feel like part of a more laid-back, innovative enterprise, they were damaging to the workers’ attention spans, productivity, creative thinking, and satisfaction. Compared with standard offices, employees experienced more uncontrolled interactions, higher levels of stress, and lower levels of concentration and motivation. When David Craig surveyed some thirty-eight thousand workers, he found that interruptions by colleagues were detrimental to productivity, and that the more senior the employee, the worse she fared.

So, why do we continue to design our workplaces around this open office concept?  Here’s what I think:

1. Recruiting.  Young talent likes to walk into the ‘cool’ office.  Executives feel that this is a recruiting advantage and a marketing advantage when customers see a new, ultra-modern office environment.

2. We think we want our office, like we want our homes.  Over the past 2 decades home builders have been ask to build open home plan designs.  We then go to our office which is all cut up into small rooms and think ‘Hey, wouldn’t this be ‘nicer’ if this was all opened up?’

3. Collaboration. Open office design was billed as the next best thing for creativity and collaboration.  It was a theory.  It was never really tested out. Someone had an idea, ‘you know what, if we break down these walls and have everyone in one big room, we’ll be more collaborative, we’ll be more creative”.  Sounds good.  Research is showing us that theory was just that, a theory.

I think for certain aspects the open concept still has merit.  Sales offices for years have been using the open concept with success, in a bullpen environment.  Hear your peers next to you on the phone, and your competitive nature takes over, you get on the phone.  You can feel and hear a buzz in the air in a well run sales bullpen.  I tend to think I’m creative, but having others around me, talking, doesn’t help my creative process.  I hear this from IT and Design professionals as well.  Have you been in a big IT shop or Design house?  Most of the pros where headphones, dim the lights, try and create an environment that the open concept isn’t giving them.

Be careful my friends.  I love the look of many of the new offices, but if it’s hurting productivity and making my workers worse – I’ll gladly give them back their offices!

The Future of HR, again.

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2014 will be the year Retention returns to HR.

Retention almost died during the great recession.  For almost 10 years HR pros were able to roam the halls of their organization and almost never had to worry about the issue of retention.  There weren’t many jobs.  Most people in times of hardship, hunker down and don’t move.  It was like a perfect retention storm! There are HR Pros who graduated out of HR programs, started their careers in the past 5 years, that have never known a time when retaining your employees was the number one priority!

That is about to change.

This year Retention of Employees will once again become a major issue that HR will be looked at to solve.   Here are some important things to remember when you begin to look at ways to retain your employees:

1. “It’s really easy to do.” That is what your executives think, so you’re in trouble.

2. You will get blamed for high turnover.  Buy a helmet, life sucks that way.

3. You will blame your crappy managers that you haven’t given any management training to in at least 5-7 years.

4. You will tell at least half the people in your organization – “We don’t have a retention problem, we have a compensation problem.” You’ll be partially right, but won’t have the competitive data to back it up, so you’ll come across a a whiny victim.

5. You’ll make at least one info-graphic trying to explain ‘Retention vs. Turnover’ to your executives.  It will fail.

6. At least one executive will come up with the brilliant idea of ‘Retention Bonuses’ and think $1,000 at the end of a year will stop people from wanting to leave your organization.  Everyone who stays throughout the year will get a $1,000 bonus but won’t know why they got it.

7. To combat your inability to retain employees, you’ll blame recruiting for not being able to find talent.  This will work until your head of recruiting gets fired and the new head of recruiting comes in and says this one line – “The best recruit is the employee we don’t have to replace.” Again, retention will be on your desk.

8. Employees don’t leave companies, they leave managers. Instead of recruiting, you now pass off your problem to the training department.  Managers will now be forced to go through soft skills leadership classes. You buy yourself 6 more months of retention not being your problem.

9. You’ll buy a ‘new’ assessment that claims to increase retention by picking the right people to begin with.  You’ll never really find out if this worked or not, because you’ve been changing so many things no one will really know.  But the HR vendor will take credit and you’ll start in their white paper and get asked to speak at their annual conference!

10. Retention will still be an issue in 2015, but by then you’ll turn everything you’ve done, and your 7% increase into retention, into a new position with a new company in town who has a worst problem than your old company. See #1 for your plan with the new company.