Category Archives: HR Technology

Reimagining HR and TA Leadership

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I’ve been thinking about this concept for the past few weeks. It keeps coming back to me and I can’t shake it. I talk about HR and TA technology a ton. When I look into the future of HR and TA technology I see a world where so much of the tactical work we do now is done through AI, Machine Learning (ML) and flat out just next-level automation.

I don’t find anyone who will argue this. I still see a bunch of consultant-types who will say “AI will not replace jobs!” Yeah, that’s wrong, it’s going to replace a whole bunch of jobs, and it will also create some jobs. The problem is the jobs it replaces, those folks are nowhere near the skill-talent we need for the jobs that will be created!

The thing is, when we think about traditional leadership, it’s usually about increased ‘responsibility’. You know what that means? More headcount! I was the head of HR for an organization where I had 25 direct reports, but I took this new gig because I now have 50 direct reports and more headcount means more money, which means a better, higher-level leadership position.

Play along with this idea. You’re working for an organization and you currently have 200 people that report up into your organization. You decide you’re going to be the most innovative HR/TA leader in the entire world, so you go all-in on technology and innovative practices. About two years into this endeavor you find, because of all the capacity you’ve been able to increase, you’re functional headcount is now only 125.

Is that a better leadership position (125)? Or is the 200 person function a better leadership position?

Of course, the more innovative function you created at 125 headcount is better, but traditional leaders will always be pulled to the higher headcount.  We tell ourselves that the more modern, innovative shop is better, and then we get a call that someone has a shop with 225 and we are pulled to the “larger” job.

We have a fundamental problem across all leadership right now. Leaders view success as empire-building, not empire shrinking. Of course, we want to work for growing organizations, but at the same time, most of us work in bloated, traditional, task-oriented shops, that need to be totally overhauled through technology and innovation. We think we run lean, but we still have three people in recruiting operations setting up interviews. We think we’re run a high-tech modern organization but we have twenty sourcing pros mining databases all day.

Great modern leaders are not about more, they are about less. How can we get to great, by using the least amount of resources possible? Don’t tell me that’s your philosophy because I see you. I see how your team works. I see so much of what actually gets done, still being done by human hands, when for a fraction of the cost there are technologies that can do it better, faster, and cheaper.

It’s a super hard paradigm shift in leadership. Less is more. We tell our teams this, but we don’t think it applies to us. As a leader, traditionally, we are always taught to try and get more. Don’t let them take headcount away from you, you’ll never get it back, add headcount whenever you can!

Modern technologies are giving us the opportunity to shrink the manpower we need. And it will force the question, what kind of leader are you? Empire-builder or Empire-shrinker?

 

Adoption of HR & Recruiting is NOT Hard! #iNFLUENCE19

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Hey, gang! I’m out this week spending some time at iCIMS Influence event. It’s part analyst event, part iCIMS customer event. Basically, bring a bunch of recruiting nerds together, that think alike, and see if some cool stuff happens. Turns out, no matter where you are in the world of TA, we all basically have the same problems! We need to fill jobs.

One of the topics that came up is the adoption of the recruiting technology we purchase. How do we get higher user adoption, etc? A very classic issue that won’t go away and there’s all this wonderful research around how we should ‘gamify’ and ‘reward’ and tell folks how great they are, even when they aren’t!

I get that ‘forcing’ someone to do something they don’t want to do, does not have great long term success! Especially in an ultra-low unemployment market. I get that we want our recruiters to have a great experience and love their jobs. I get that we want candidates to have a great experience and love our companies. I. Get. All. Of. That.

So, can get real for a second?

The adoption of technology is not difficult. It’s actually a super easy concept. Here are the 4 steps:

1. Integrate your actual work processes within the technology so that work can’t be completed without using the technology. I.E., Workarounds will not show up on data, virtually meaning, the work did not happen.

2. Do you believe the technology you purchased actually makes you a better organization? If so, then it is a condition of employment that we/you/they use the technology to make our organization more successful. Yes, Karen, that means you’ll have to change and use the new system, even though you’ve used the old way for 32 straight years. If you decide not to use the technology that will make our organization more successful, we will find someone who will. Period.

3. Part of technology adoption is a continued desire to test and innovate, so ensure our technology is still our most successful choice, or maybe something better has come along and we need to adapt and adjust. So, we’ll have an actual measure around testing potential new technology to replace or enhance our stack.

4. Repeat steps 1-3 on an ongoing basis.

Numbers one and two should be very clear to you. Great process design fully utilizes your tech. Great performance management ensures your people use the tech.

Number three is the one some folks will decide isn’t needed, but here’s why it’s critical! Billy decides your tech sucks and his way is better and Billy goes rogue. You tell Billy that a decision, above his pay grade, has been made that to ensure the success of our organization we are going to utilize the technology we’ve purchased to its fullest capabilities (step 1).

You also let Billy know that he will not be forced to use this technology, and we will certainly miss having him around the office. (step 2). But, Billy, we have another option for you, because we love you and value you, we want you to work the tech we have 100%, but we have a side project that we want you to test, and maybe, this side project will demonstrate to our decision-makers there is a better, more effective way to run our process (step 3).

Adoption is maintained. Billy is helping us get better. All is right with the world.

The adoption of technology is not a technology problem, it’s a leadership communication problem, and it’s easily solved.

 

BREAKING NEWS: Symphony Talent Acquires Smashfly! @symphonytalent_ @Smashfly

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Well, the M&A activity in the TA Technology industry doesn’t seem to be slowing down as this morning Symphony Talent announced it has acquired the recruiting CRM technology platform Smashfly. You had a feeling that something was going to happen as you began to see the major recruiting CRMs in the industry align themselves with core ATS or enterprise HCM recruiting modules.

3 Big Questions about the acquisition of Smashfly by Symphony Talent? 

1. Who the heck is Symphony Talent? 

I know some of you are asking that because Symphony Talent is the biggest name in the industry! Symphony Talent is the ATS built by Hodes a few years ago, and the first and only ATS that has built-in Programmatic advertising ability. Maybe a bit ahead of the game, when it was launched I was really impressed with what they had. Their CEO, Roopesh Nair, is a super-smart dude that has major passion around the TA industry.

2. Does this merger of brands make sense for both Smashfly and Symphony Talent?

It does because what I am seeing from organizations that truly care about attracting better talent is you better have an end to end recruitment platform that includes a core ATS at the center and a great recruitment marketing platform on the front-end. With this marriage, you also get the strength of Symphony’s industry-only builtin programmatic engine.

3. Will this integrated platform be able to gain market share in the industry?

That’s really the biggest question. For how advanced Symphony Talent’s technology was in the ATS space, they struggled to sell it, mainly because it probably seemed too advance more most corporate TA leaders.  CRM tech is also very advanced and complex and the reality is Smashfly was probably the best in the industry at selling CRM by making it not seem as complex. So, great tech and great marketing/sales should work for these two brands, in my opinion.

What would I do if I was Roopesh? 

To be fair, I’ve met Roopesh a couple of times and I’ve really enjoyed those conversations and his knowledge of the talent acquisition industry. The reality is Smashfly is a great brand because they’ve been great at marketing, and I would drop the Symphony Talent brand, adopt the Smashfly brand, and built out the integrated platform.

To me, you run with a better-known brand, that has a solid reputation in the industry and use that to sell the full end-to-end recruitment platform. Most enterprise HCM users are stuck with vanilla recruiting modules who can’t buy an ATS but can buy recruitment marketing. It just makes sense for them to buy a recruitment marketing platform that just happens to have an ATS built-in!

This opens up their ability to sell to SAP, Oracle, Workday, Infor, UltiPro, Ceridian TA shops, as well as chip away at the best of breed market currently owned by iCIMS, Greenhouse and SmartRecruiters in the mid-enterprise market.

To be perfectly clear, Roopesh didn’t call me and ask, but he has my number if he needs it! 😉

What I learned at Workday Rising 2019! #wdayrising

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I love HR Technology. You all know that. So, I was super excited to get invited to Workday Rising since it’s arguably the hottest HR Tech company on the planet, and quite frankly, in the past, they really haven’t engaged the influencer community much, and probably didn’t need to with all of their success.

I’m interested because Workday is disrupting the HR Tech world in a major way, and really the entire ERP landscape. It seems like every single day I speak to a CHRO or CPO who has made the switch to Workday or are in the process of getting ready to make the switch. Currently, they have about half of the Fortune 100, and if you have 2000 employees and above there is a good chance your CFO, CIO, and, we hope, the CHRO are in discussions on whether they should be looking at Workday as their core system.

I came to Workday Rising on a mission. I hear from Workday Recruiting users mostly and many looking for help on how to make it work better for their organizations. I’m not a Workday Recruiting expert, in fact, until this week I never saw the product. I was just hearing stories from those using it and implementing it. So, everything I had was out of context. Getting that context this week certainly helps me understand where Workday is and where they are going with a number of their products and technologies.

So, what did I learn at Workday Rising? 

– Workday sells the “Power of One” really heavily and I never really bought into the pitch, but when you dig into the core tech side of it, it’s certainly compelling based on how organizations should be and will be using data in the future to be more competitive and better performing. And the plans that Workday has using Machine Learning across their platform moving forward. Other enterprise HCMs will struggle to compete with Workday’s capabilities in this area.

– Workday Recruiting – is a core HCM job requisition system. It was launched five years ago and they are building out features as fast as they can. Workday Recruiting doesn’t try and see itself, at this moment, as an end to end recruiting platform. It’s a large enterprise applicant tracking system built for enterprise-level hiring and compliance on a global scale. That isn’t easy to pull off at scale. They have invested in some great add-on technologies to build out your TA tech stack, like Beamery (CRM-Recruitment Marketing), Mya (recruiting chatbot, AI, automation), and Pymetrics (talent matching AI), all of which by the way are top Best of Breed TA Technologies.

– The Workday Recruiting pain point with many clients has been lack of LinkedIn integration and I got to see what Workday will be launching soon around their LinkedIn integration and it’s impressive, and current Workday Recruiting users who are also heavy LinkedIn users will be excited for this.

– Maybe the miss, from my conversations with current and upcoming Workday Recruiting clients, is these clients believing they’ll just use Workday Recruiting for recruiting and won’t have to build out the rest of their TA tech stack. You will and you should, especially if you need to do a higher amount of external recruiting. I still believe “we” (me, you, Workday, etc.) can build out some great tech stacks around Workday Recruiting that will rock. That’s a goal of mine! (Sackett Stacks!)

– Workday Talent Marketplace is impressive. The reality is in large organizations is that you have 3-4 main buckets of hires: 40-60% will come internally; 20-40% will come from referrals; 10-20% will come from external recruiting; 1-10% will come from your contingent workforce (contractors, temps, consultants, etc.). That means internal hiring and mobility is truly your most important type of hiring the larger you are, and it’s what younger generations are demanding from employers of choice. Workday’s Talent Marketplace is a better internal hiring experience than you’ll find in any other tech on the market.

– I tend to judge HR and TA Technology on their leadership, mostly. Do I believe the leadership at all levels, executive, technology, product, sales, etc. have the capability to pull this off? I’ll start with the Workday Talent Optimization and Recruiting product folks because after spending some time with these teams they are loaded with talented folks who ‘get it’. While you might want changes and updates faster, this isn’t some best of breed SMB technology that can just whip out features on a daily basis. Enterprise-level buyers and users have different needs on so many levels that it takes time to build and test before launching out globally and ensuring it works at scale.

– I met a ton of enterprise clients using Workday Recruiting that were very happy with the product and the direction and the consistent deliverables of the roadmap for the Recruiting product. They are also understanding that this power of one platform across the organization is important for the future of what they want to do in establishing systems that will deliver a better overall employee experience. I actually thought I would show up and hear bitching, and honestly, I didn’t. I heard way more excitement over the new stuff and a customer base that feels like they are being heard and an understanding that there’s a bigger picture to enterprise ERP than just core HCM or Recruiting, or payroll.

– The CEO of Workday, Aneel Bhusri, and his leadership team, especially their technology team, really have a strong grasp of where they are going with the platform into the future. You get the feeling from them, almost like parents with kids about Santa Claus, like they know something the rest of us don’t, in a good way. They are confident their direction will not only be successful for Workday, but ultimately for their clients, and you can’t doubt it with their growth. They are pushing the Machine Learning around their data really heavily and I think they’ll be an industry leader their very soon based on the tech they’ve built across the platform.

So, Did I sell out to Workday?

I know some folks in the industry are going to read this and think that. I will say I’ve been super consistent over the past five years writing about my learnings in HR and TA Technology that I will tell you what I like about a product and then encourage you to go demo and make your own conclusions. I’ve been super consistent in writing on this blog to help others in our community understand all of this a bit more easily.

I’m not an HR and TA Technology hater, I’m an HR and TA Technology geek! Can Workday get better at certain things? Yep. Does Workday have an understanding they need to get better at certain things? Yep. Is Workday going to be all things for all people? No, and they don’t want to, which is part of their strength. They know exactly who they are and who they want to become.

I was asked to come to Workday Rising as an “Influencer”. They put no constraints on me on what I could say on social media or write on my blog. They took a risk and I want to thank the team for trusting me enough to let me in on the inside and giving me such great access to your leadership teams and product teams.

These were just some of the highlights from my own lense of interest, there is really so much more I could share about some other really cool stuff Workday is doing. Here are some links on some of the other stuff that is worth reading:

Workday Extends Technology Leadership With Innovations for the Changing World of HR

Machine Learning Across Workday Products: Delivering Business Value to Customers

Workday People Experience: An Advantage in the Changing World of Work

Advice We Need, but It’s Super Hard to Take! #wdayrising @Lin_Manuel

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I’m out at Workday Rising this week in Orlando and yesterday I got the pleasure of listening to Lin-Manuel Miranda speak for the morning keynote. For those who follow me socially, I’ve seen Hamilton the musical four times (almost a 5th, but I got swindled!). So, I’m a bit of a super fan! Hamilton tickets aren’t cheap, it’s an investment to be a fan!

Miranda’s first big break was one he created himself when he wrote his first musical called “In the Heights“. Lin-Manuel is a Puerto Rican-American and in musical theater, there were basically almost zero rolls, so if he wanted to do musical theater he felt he needed to write his own role, so he did.  It was successful, which led to other opportunities and to him being able to develop Hamilton.

The advice so many of us need, but it’s super hard to accept is that many times to be successful, or chance your dreams, you have to create your own opportunities to make that happen.

Especially, if you don’t have the same privilege as others trying to do what you’re doing. My mom started her own company because she was sick of outperforming dudes in the same company and not getting the recognition. Miranda wrote his own roles, not thinking it would be ‘broadway’ successful, but that it was something he could perform locally and show people his abilities and that would lead him on his path.

It would be easy to say he was lucky with In the Heights, but it’s not really luck, he’s truly a genius when it comes to musical theater. He created his own luck by putting in years of work creating something that was perfect for him. It’s a great reminder for any of us who are feeling that there just isn’t the ‘perfect’ opportunity for you in the world.

My favorite quotes and ideas from Lin-Manuel Miranda’s keynote:

  • He came out on stage at a giant technology conference and said, “I feel like I’m launching Windows 95!” which drew huge laughter from the crowd.
  • When asked if he accepted the offer to do the Mary Poppins movie immediately he said, “NO! I had to go ask my wife!” And explained when you have a partnership you have to discuss these types of things because it has a huge impact on the other person, on your life, even if it’s a dream come true. (he seems super grounded!)
  • Hamilton musical stuff:
    • Burr came from a privileged background, a famous grandfather, father was the president of Princeton, he had so much to lose by saying or doing the wrong thing, and this shaped his decision making. Hamilton came from nothing and had nothing to lose. This clearly shaped his behavior and decisions and gave his enemies much to use against him, but he had nothing to lose, in the beginning. Imagine if we all went through life as if we had nothing to lose? What could we accomplish?
    • When you get criticism, and Lin-Manuel as an artist gets a lot of it, it’s important to understand the point of view from where it’s coming. Then, you can make the decision, do I accept that and change, or do I go back and try to change them.
    • “The best idea always wins” – Miranda talking about his writing and production process with his team.
    • “The teller changes the story” – Each person who tells a story will change it slightly based on their perspective. In HR we see this all the time as we get multiple sides of issues in our environments.
    • The interview asked Hamilton how he decided to use all minorities in the cast of Hamilton. He said if I made a hip hop founding father story and used all white dudes, you would have thought I messed up! We do Shakespeare and we constantly change the characters to whatever and it’s accepted, why can’t we do that with the founding fathers? It doesn’t change the story.
    • How did he come up with doing a Hip Hop version of the founding fathers? Hamilton’s story is a perfect hip hop/rap story. He came from nothing. Had huge bravado. Rose up to be powerful and wealthy. Got into a gun battle. Sounds like hip hop!

More to come tomorrow on my breakdown of Workday Rising specifically! But I had to write about Lin-Manual Miranda!

Where Does Corporate Logo-wear Go to Die?

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This is the very first blog post I ever wrote! It was 4-12-09 over at Fistful of Talent. I just got back from HR Tech, this past week, where I was wearing a bunch of corporate logo-wear (see the pic above wearing at Patagonia vest from Candidate.ID) and it made me think for as far as I’ve come, I haven’t really come that far at all! 😉 

If you are like me, you’ve had a job or two in your career, and each stop along the way you pick up a few extra pieces for your wardrobe that you wouldn’t have necessarily picked out on your own.  These pieces usually are of the polo shirt variety, but they need not stop there as I’ve been given dress shirts, t-shirts, baseball hats, jackets, watches, sweatshirts – to date no undergarments – Thank you!

In almost every situation, these items were encouraged to be worn on casual Friday’s (check on Punk
Rock HR’s post on Casual Fridays).  My question is once you leave an organization, what do you do with this corporate logo wear?  Also, where does it all go?

I have to admit that most of my previous corporate wear went to Goodwill and I imagine (in my own little fantasy world) that somehow it all gets funneled into the international Goodwill community.  From there I know that there is some guy in need in West Africa wearing my “Applebee’s  #1 HR Peoplestacks 2007” jacket, not knowing what Applebee’s is or what he is wearing such a limited edition item.  I can say that I’ve never seen anyone locally wearing my gear, so at the very least I appreciate Goodwill for not re-selling my stuff local!  Can you imagine seeing someone at the movies wearing your shirt – how do you start that conversation “Hey – that was me – I’m the Applebee’s Peoplestack Guy!”

So, what’s the point?

I have to admit, it is usually us in HR who has this bright idea to reward our people with logo merchandise.  On one level we believe our associates will appreciate the gear and having the ability to promote the company they so proudly work for.  On another level, we are probably missing the boat completely, especially when looking at generational differences in terms of rewards and recognition.

I do believe Baby Boomers and the older Gen X set probably do feel appreciated when getting some of these rewards (assuming these aren’t the only rewards).  But, I would dare say, Gen Y probably doesn’t view this as reward and recognition and actually might take this as a negative now feeling like they have to or should wear these items at work.

Rule of Thumb:  Save your money and challenge your department to come up with other ways to reward and recognize.  That being said, I’m wearing my Careerbuilder.com Logo Nike golf shirt right now which just goes to show you, HR vendors need to go high-end to get into my closet!

(BTW – none of this has changed. If you want to get in my closet it better be branded swag! Shout out to Smashfly, OC Tanner, and Saba for great branded swag this year!) 

 

The One Piece of Technology Recruiting Leaders Say They Can’t Live Without! #HRTechConf

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I led a panel yesterday at the HR Technology Conference around the evolving talent acquisition stack. My panelists were a great group of TA Leaders, Jennifer Shappley from LinkedIn, Jim Livingston from Quicken Loans, and Sola Osinoiki from Prosus Group, who all shared selflessly about their stack, their wins, and their struggles.

One the question I asked all there was what piece of technology outside of your core ATS could you not do without. When I asked the question I assumed I would hear about recruitment marketing technology, or sourcing technology, or some sort of assessment they were using, but that wasn’t the case.

In fact, all three, without being previously prompted said the one piece of technology they could not do without was their Business Intelligence software. Respectively, Linkedin and Prosus used Tableau, and Quicken Loans uses Microsoft’s Power BI. I have a feeling, eventually, LinkedIn will probably make the move to Microsoft as well, because, well, Microsoft owns LinkedIn!

It makes sense that this would be the most irreplaceable tool. At no point in history has data been more important or more powerful to leaders and HR and TA leaders are no different than any other function. In fact, we could argue HR and TA have combined more data than any other function.

My push back was doesn’t your core ATS deliver the data you need. Every single ATS on the market is building or has built powerful internal BI and reporting tools. Why are they going through this effort if you’re going to just extract your data and pull it into a business intelligence tool?

The response from the panel was basically, enterprise-level organizations, that are using multiple pieces of technology within their recruiting stack need to have the story and pictures around all of this data to truly understand what is happening, and what decisions need to be made moving forward. SMB organizations that are primarily only using the ATS for most of their recruiting can get away with using the internal reporting from an ATS, but the larger your stack becomes, the more of a necessity it is to have BI tools.

Great insight from the group on how modern HR and TA leaders are really invested in their data like never before. These leaders are having to push themselves and their teams to really educate themselves around data so they keep their organizations on a successful path. It’s definitely a leadership skill set that is underrated and probably not looked at enough when it comes to promotion and hiring, but that is quickly going to change!

The difficult piece of BI tools is developing and showing the ROI. You buy a sourcing tool and you can show a drop in third party spend. You purchase a LinkedIn membership and you can show how it helped you hire so many more of a certain role, etc. You buy a business intelligence tool and it will show you what you should be doing that you’re not, but it isn’t as clear on giving you a straight line ROI.

The difference is, though, your executives, especially the c-suite, gets the value of great data. So, in reality, it becomes less of an ROI conversation, and more of a strategy conversation, which for the most part, they are already bought into. So, two great BI tools to go demo, and there are others out their as well. Modern-day TA leaders must-have business intelligence in their stack!

Mothers, Sons, and Daughters! #HRTechConf

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I’m out at “The” HR Technology Conference this week in Las Vegas and a few years ago HR Tech started a Women in HR Technology event that happens the morning of the opening of the conference with specific content built around the unique role of women in our industry.

I’m a big fan, and I think LRP (the company that runs the HR Technology Conference, and Jeanne Achille who chairs this part of the conference) have done an exceptional job building content that you really find nowhere else in our industry. Which leads me to the panel I was on, “Mothers, Sons, and Daughters” with my co-panelist, Jess Von Bank and Kyle Lagunas.

The idea Jeanne gave us and we ran with was around this idea that women in technology play these multiple roles, that are very different than their male counterparts. Jess is a single Mom of three young girls and a successful professional in our industry. Kyle is a son and aspiring father, and I’m a son to a woman who started the business I currently run. We all have very strong beliefs around the impact and influence women make on our lives.

I can’t stress enough how this type of content does not happen at conferences. Not technology conferences. Not HR conferences. Not any conferences I’ve been to! It was real and raw, and we were able to have this awesome conversation with a bunch of attendees that was unfiltered.

You see my quote from the tweet above. One of the questions we wanted to tackle is, “Do women make better leaders?”

This part of the conversation really centered around how we were raised and what were the things our mothers gave us to be successful in life. Where those things the same things that possibly give women an advantage in leadership roles in the modern workplace?

Gen Z and Millennials are looking for workplaces and leadership that are empathetic, compassionate, developmental, and understand that they want to bring their whole self to work. Traditional leadership kind of frowned on all this. You come to work, to work! Don’t bring your personal life to work!

Any leader can have the traits to be successful as a modern leader, but we find that females tend to have more of these traits than males, and it much easier for them to develop these traits deeper, primarily because of how they were nurtured and nurture as mothers.

I left the session inspired by the women in our industry and the great things they are doing to move the workforce and our workplaces forward. Great organizations need great talent. That won’t happen in a traditional workplace that our parents grew up in. My mom ran a successful company partly because the employees of her company were her family. She used those words constantly and meant it. She took it very personal to make sure they could and would succeed.

I want to send a huge thank you to LRP and Jeanne for allowing us to indulge in a very personal topic that is ever-present, but rarely talked about!

Is Being a Founder a Career Death Sentence? #HRTechConf

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I’m out at The HR Technology Conference in Las Vegas this week and it struck me at the number of ‘Founders’ I meet when I’m here. The founders I meet seem like the perfect person you would want to hire. Super motivated. Smart. Creative. They believe in an idea and they are willing to do what it takes to make that idea a reality.

Sounds perfect, right?

Turns out, we actually hate hiring Founders! In fact, in a strange twist of fate, we actually hate hiring successful Founders more than failed Founders! Why? Well, if you’re successful we feel you will just leave us and go be successful again. If you fail at being a Founder, we feel you’re beaten down enough to come be your employee and you’ll probably be super happy to be an employee!

That’s why most all of us suck at hiring! We have no idea what really matters or makes a difference!

We know that like 99% of startups fail. So, we have these great people who are willing to go try and hit a grand slam, but they strikeout. Because they actually took that big swing and did all those things we think are great, we actually then don’t want to hire them. Um, what!?

Not only that, if these same folks are actually successful, but then decide to exit, then we really don’t want to hire them because we somehow don’t think they’ll hang around long enough!?! We are all insane and have no idea how to judge talent! “But we only hire the ‘best’ talent!” No, you don’t! You hire people who don’t intimidate you in any way.

Part of it is the concept around entrepreneurship. We all say we want to hire employees who are ‘entrepreneurs’, but not ‘real’ entrepreneurs. More like entrepreneurs who went to school to be entrepreneurs but they were smart enough to know they would actually fail at being entrepreneurs so they’ll come work for us and be entrepreneurs, non-entrepreneurs!

I find that most of the “Founders” out here at HR Tech are not the type of folks who went to school to be an Entrepreneur. I find most folks who go to college and get a degree in “Entrepreneurship” actually want to start a bar or a t-shirt clothing brand or have one nerdy friend who can code, so they go after starting some sort of delivery-service app.

I find most of the HR Tech founders have come from all walks of life, but mostly technologist, where they ran into an issue and said to themselves, “there should be a solution for this”. Very few were from HR or TA. Many did work in corporate environments which is where the idea came from. So, the reality is, they have already shown to want to work in the corporate world.

So, what does this all mean? We need to look at someone being a former Founder of a company as a great thing, not a bad thing. Those former founders can be complete rock stars in your company!

HR Pros: Do you spend more time eliminating negative or creating great experiences? #Greatness19

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While I was out at Influence Greatness this week I came across a great little nugget of genius from the O.C. Tanner Institute. They released their 2020 Global Culture Report and one of the main things they are looking into currently is employee experience. It’s been a super hot topic over the past few years and we still really no so little about it.

What we believe to be true is negative employee experiences are bad. We can all agree on that, right?! At the same time, we also tend to believe that positive employee experiences are good but really worth about the same as stopping a negative experience. So, we (HR pros and leaders) spend a great deal of our time eliminating negative experiences and trying to ensure new negative experiences don’t happen.

The O.C. Tanner study is going to change how we think about employee experiences moving forward!

From the picture above you already know the big finding! Positive experiences outlast negative experiences for a duration of four weeks to two weeks. Meaning, if you have a great employee experience happen to you, it carries over, on average for four weeks, while a negative experience we only carry for about two weeks.

This really should change our behavior where we spend way more time trying to create peak employee experiences versus eliminating valley, or negative, experiences for our employees. I’m not sure it will, though. Why?

Creating ‘wow’ experiences, peak experiences, for an employee is hard. Many times those great experiences actually happen by chance. Someone does a great job on a project, and from that work, something amazing happens with appreciation or recognition, that wasn’t planned, and “Bam!” a peak experience happens.

It’s easier for us to just keep fighting fires. “Oh, jeez! There goes Mark again hitting on the gals in payroll, we need to shut this down…” Don’t you feel better, now? We stopped this negative experience from happening! Now you can go back to enjoying your normal, daily average employee experience, minus creepy Mark hitting on you!

Stopping negative from happening isn’t great HR, it’s just HR. It’s what is expected. Making great happen isn’t expected, and it’s probably why those experiences stay with us so much longer. The cool part about working to create ‘great’ experiences for your employees is once you start going down that path it becomes easier and easier to come up with ideas and ways to create great. Like every skill, the more you do it, the better and easier it becomes!

The first step is for HR to make the behavior change. No, I’m not saying ignore negative experiences. Do what HR does and stop those, but let’s not linger there. Stop it, move on. Get back to the more valuable work of creating lasting great experiences that will do more to drive the culture we want to foster and nurture.

The data is robust, so it’s hard to ignore. This isn’t some small sample of one workplace. This is thousands of employees over hundreds of work locations and many countries. I love it because it forces me to think differently about what we do in HR and why. What I do know is working to make great experiences sounds like a way better job than putting out fires all day!