Should Job Hopping Be Encouraged?

Posted on January 14, 2016 by Tim Sackett

Am I old school?

No, really? Please let me know in the comments because this recent article from Fast Company makes no sense to me! Check this out:

“JOB HOPPERS ARE BELIEVED TO HAVE A HIGHER LEARNING CURVE, BE HIGHER PERFORMERS, AND EVEN TO BE MORE LOYAL…In terms of managing your own career, if you don’t change jobs every three years, you don’t develop the skills of getting a job quickly, so then you don’t have any career stability,” (Penelope) Trunk tells Fast Company. “You’re just completely dependent on the place that you work as if it’s 1950, and you’re going to get a gold watch at the end of a 50-year term at your company.”

Really? I’m not sure Talent Acquisition leaders, across the world, share Penelope’s philosophy on job hopping!

I don’t buy any of this.

In the minds of hiring managers, Job Hoppers are Job Hoppers for a reason. Which basically comes down to you weren’t good enough to stick with any one company you were with. Sure some of that hopping might be they were in a bad company who didn’t treat them like they should have been treated. At which point, a normal person, would learn from this bad fit and choice of employer, and make a better one.

I even job hopped a little in the early part of my career. I was chasing an executive title. In hindsight, it was the dumbest thing I ever did!

This is bad advice, plain and simple.

Don’t job hop. For every person that it helps, it will hurt ten others. Hiring managers still hate to see job hopping on a resume, and they’ll question what is wrong with you if your resume looks like you job hop.

Even in the tech sector, which I work in every day, hiring managers hate to see IT pros that have ten jobs in ten years. They’ll still hire you now, because the need is so great, but eventually the economy of the IT market, supply and demand, will catch up. At that point, your job hopping resume will not be desired.

So, how do you fix this, if you’re currently in this job hopper cycle?

I recommend to job seekers that they bundle many of their ‘projects’ into one consulting job, to make it, at least, appear to be under one umbrella of an employer. We see many IT pros doing this now as contingent workers and incorporating themselves. Work several projects at different companies, but all managed under one brand. It’s not perfect, but it looks a little better.

Job hopping should never be encouraged. Making a change because your career is stagnant is something completely different. Most careers don’t get stagnant in 2-3 years!

Have You Noticed, Most Companies Suck at Recruiting

Posted on January 11, 2016 by Tim Sackett

Recruiting isn’t about hiring one person. That’s easy.

It’s about consistently hiring one person, and that person should be, at the very least, as talented as the last person you hired. But, really more talented. Then, continually do that, hire better talent, over and over.

To do that, you have to be able to continually build a better mousetrap. You have to continually get better organizationally and individually.

The reason we suck at recruiting is we get satisfied with making that one hire.

“Yay! We did it.”

“Now, what?”

Great recruiting organizations aren’t satisfied with one hire. They aren’t satisfied with having all of their positions filled. They only get satisfied when they are replacing lower talent, with higher talent.

That’s a really hard place to get to. 99.99% of organizations will never get there. It’s really hard work. Heavy lifting.

So, we give up. Screw it. We’ll just keep filling these one positions.

This is why you suck at recruiting. Your goal is fill positions, not to make the talent in your organization better. If increasing the talent was your goal, you would do things differently. You would act differently. Your sense of urgency would be different.

Talent Acquisition isn’t about acquiring bodies. It’s about making the talent in your organization better. Every day. Every week. Every year.

Most companies suck at recruiting because they see recruiting as filling positions.

How Much Did Your Dreams Cost?

Posted on January 4, 2016 by Tim Sackett

It’s the holidays, do yourself a favor and go out and download or Redbox the movie “Up In the Air“. It’s a great movie for HR pros. One of the best scenes is this one (below) between George Clooney and J.K. Simmons:

Enjoy your time off, if you have it. Either way, answer me this, how much did you get paid to give up your dreams?

I got paid $20,000. That’s how much I get paid, salary, for my first Recruiting job right out of college.

I wanted to be a college volleyball coach. I was good at it. I loved doing it. I found my wife because of it.

$20,000.

It seems silly, now, looking back on it. $20,000 is nothing. My life has worked out wonderfully, but it’s a lesson I’ll pass along to my kids. Dreams are wasted on the young. Don’t give up your chance when you are young. All too soon, you’ll reach a stage in life where your dreams won’t seem that important any longer.

We are told that the key to a happy work life is to find a job you love, and you’ll never ‘work’ another day as long as you live. About .01% of people actually find jobs they truly love. The rest of the 99.9% work jobs that are fine, but not love. You only fall in love with a job when you follow your dreams.

It’s not 100%. Sometimes your dreams end up sucking. Don’t get down about that. Many, many people suck at their dreams. That’s life. You’re allowed to change your dreams. Just don’t wait too long to do it!

The Next Generation Just Named Itself! #NicknamingYourselfIsStupid

Posted on December 21, 2015 by Tim Sackett

Have you ever had a nickname you didn’t want? You were in the third grade and crapped your pants and some dumb kid called you ‘Stinky’ and it stuck, for life! The rest of your life you got to go around being called ‘Stinky’ and having to explain this to people.

I think most people in those situations try to create a new nickname! “Hey, guys, just call me Dice! I was at summer camp and all the guys there called me “Dice”! We played this game with dice and I was really great at it, anyway, it stuck. So, you guys can call me Dice, I’m cool with it.” Okay, Stinky, we got you!

There’s only one rule in nicknames. That rule? You can’t make your own nickname!

To my surprise the great folks at MTV decided it would be a great idea for the kids over at GenZ, that generation under the Millennials, to just come up with their own generational nickname. The MTV crew actually surveyed thousands of high school kids from across the country to determine what they would prefer to have their ‘generation’ called.

Say hello to The Founders!

Why the founders? Well, apparently this next generation has attached itself the Silicon Valley culture of founding companies. Not they have really actually done this, but it’s what they identify with, so why not act like you started this whole dot com, startup thingy.

What do we really know about these Founders? A few things for sure, that I think will help organizations understand this next generation entering the workforce:

1. They were raised during the Great Recession. Not since the Great Depression, have so many kids witnessed parents and adults close to them lose so many jobs and struggle financially. This will impact their work ethic, the importance of keeping a job, etc. Think the opposite of how Millennials view work! The Founders probably have more in common with the Greatest Generation, than the Millennials.

2. They have never not had a Smartphone. This will impact how they do their work, how they socialize and how they communicate. The Millennials had flip phones to start!

3. The media has bombarded them with unrealistic views of what work looks like. Google is an outlier, not the norm. Yet, they tend to believe it’s the norm because the ‘Googlized’ work environment gets so much publicity. 99% of work environments do not look like Google. This will cause some ‘hey, I didn’t expect this’ moments for a ton of kids in their first jobs.

I hate naming generations. Millennials, Founders, Gen-X… They’re kids. They won’t know their ass from a hole in the ground, and you’ll have to teach them most everything they’ll need to know about your company and your jobs, because our educational system continues give them real-world skills to compete.

Call them whatever you want. Entry level always seems to fit best.

How President Obama Would Build a Team.

Posted on December 18, 2015 by Tim Sackett

One of my favorite writers is Bill Simmons of Grantland fame. Recently, Bill got the chance to interview President Obama for GQ Magazine. Bill is traditionally a sports writer, huge NBA fan, but also does a ton of pop culture pieces as well. So, why not the President!?

The article is great. A good read for sure. One thing I took out of it was how President Obama explains how he builds a team around him. It came when Bill asked him who he would take a call from of he was out to dinner with his wife, Michelle. A tricky situation for all husbands! My wife is the most important person in my life, BUT sometimes you have to take that call!

From the GQ article:

“Malia and Sasha. [laughs] And maybe my mother-in-law. My national security adviser, Susan Rice, and Denis McDonough, my chief of staff. Those are the only people whose call I would take during a date night with Michelle. But the entire White House is full of people who have enormous responsibilities. You can’t do this by yourself. The principle of team building in the White House is really no different than the principle of team building anywhere, on a sports team or a well-run business. Do they put team ahead of themselves? Do you make sure all the pieces fit together? Because just having the best athletes, if they’re knocking heads and nobody’s doing rebounding and everybody wants the ball, it isn’t always going to work.”

It’s the essence of leadership, right?

Surround yourself with great talent that is willing to work as a team for the greater good of the whole organization. Sounds so easy, but it’s so freaking hard to get right!

We tend to overly believe in just getting the best talent, but too often the team with the best talent fails. Too many organizations do not put enough time into the concept of the pieces fitting together, but that is the secret sauce of great leaders. The talent doesn’t have to be the best. Usually, the space between the best and very good is so small you wouldn’t be able to tell anyway!

The one thing you must get right is whether or not the talent you have, fits together and works together. The final step, once they all fit together and work together is getting them to works together towards that overarching organizational goal. Another tough thing to consistently make happen. Some teams love working together, but can’t complete the task of reaching the organizational goal.

President Obama gets it. It’s probably the reason he got elected for two terms. Any leadership position has very little to do with what you know, and everything to do with the team you are able to put around you. That team will define your leadership success.

How To Fall In Love With Your Job. Just. Do. This.

Posted on December 17, 2015 by Tim Sackett

A psychologist, Arthur Aron, came up with a way to get to strangers to fall in love with each other. His research is fascinatingly simple! It basically comes down to having the two people sit down facing each other, then methodically going through and asking and answering a set of 36 increasingly more intense personal questions. This experience gets the individuals to understand each other a highly personal level.

Here are some of the questions:

They start somewhat easy:

4. What would constitute a “perfect” day for you?

5. When did you last sing to yourself? To someone else?

9. For what in your life do you feel most grateful?

begin to increase in intensity:

17. What is your most treasured memory?

18. What is your most terrible memory?

19. If you knew that in one year you would die suddenly, would you change anything about the way you are now living? Why?

and continue down an emotional path:

30. When did you last cry in front of another person? By yourself?

33. If you were to die this evening with no opportunity to communicate with anyone, what would you most regret not having told someone? Why haven’t you told them yet?

36. Share a personal problem and ask your partner’s advice on how he or she might handle it. Also, ask your partner to reflect back to you how you seem to be feeling about the problem you have chosen.

The science behind this study, is if you can honestly answer all 36 questions with this other person, you will probably share more with this one person, and them with you, then you have ever shared with any one person in your life!

So, how do you get someone to fall in love with their job?

Modify the technique and questions between an employee and their direct supervisor. The questions don’t have to all be asked at one time. Strategically, using these questions to drive frank discussions between employee and supervisor over time will get both to truly value and understand each other.

You can imagine how some of these questions would look:

1. Tell me about the job you loved the most and why?

2. What part of this job do you love doing? Hate doing?

3. Who has had the most influence in your life, to this point, and what do they do for you on a daily, weekly, monthly basis?

Here’s the deal, though. It takes two to fall in love! Your managers/leaders have to become as vulnerable as the employee. Turns out HR has very little to do with getting employees to fall in love with their job. Having strong, understanding relationships at work, have more impact than some silly HR program. But, HR could help develop this employee/leader process!

Crazy. Real conversations with employees. Truly getting to know them. Makes a difference. This isn’t your parents leadership model!

Check out all 36 questions. They could make for some really dynamic ‘date night’ conversations!

HR Pros! You Should Be Going To Court More!

Posted on December 14, 2015 by Tim Sackett

There’s one thing we as HR pros are pretty consistent on. We never want to go to court! We do just about anything to mitigate risk for ourselves and our organizations. The first step of HR Club is don’t go to court!

Now, that’s how most HR pros feel. I don’t. I don’t believe it’s HR’s job to mitigate risk. I believe it’s HR’s job to advise our decision makers of risk. Of course, if you are a decision maker, in HR, then it’s your job to mitigate risk over what you’re responsible for. All that being said, I’m in the minority of that opinion.

So, why do I feel this way? It’s all numbers to me. Check this out from FloridaOvertimeLawyer.com:

-In 2014, there were 88,778 Employment Related Charges Filed in the U.S.

-In 2014, from those charges, a total of $372,100,000 dollars was awarded to the winners of those cases.

-That averages out to just: $4,191.35 per case.

Here’s the reality of employment related cases:

-Most cases are won by the employer.

-Employee and Past Employees believe their cases are worth millions.

-Most end up settling for a few thousand dollars.

First, I’m not advising you to not be safe and just go all willy-nilly and go to court! Don’t be stupid. Also, don’t allow yourself and your organization to be held hostage by an employee or past employee threatening a lawsuit. Most you can settle for way less than you can ever believe!

When I first started in HR I was always shocked by how small of amount of money it would take to make ‘problems’ go away, from a legal standpoint. The numbers above say the same thing. Sure, there is always a risk of a big score. Usually, the companies that get hit with those are truly doing something very bad. If you’re doing good work and trying to follow the letter of the law, rarely do those cases turn into major scores for employees.

Do you want to go to court? Of course not. You, also, don’t want to allow your organization to be bullied by an employee who is taking advantage of your fear of going to court. Judges are really smart people. They see through most con-artists pretty quickly. I’ve been to court on employment matters a number of times, and each time the judge was fair to my organization, and called out bullshit when they saw it.

Do good work. Do good by your employees. Don’t allow your organization to bad stuff. Trust our legal system will do what’s right. Don’t allow yourself to be held hostage!

Open Office Spaces Now Suck…But wait for it…

Posted on December 11, 2015 by Tim Sackett

This just in! Google got it wrong! It seems like we keep hearing that more and more these days. The company that seemingly invited HR and Talent Acquisition keeps getting it wrong. This time, it’s around the open office concept. To be fair to Google, they weren’t the first ones to jump on the open office bandwagon. They just became the poster child for crazy office spaces gone wild. From The Washington Post:

Despite its obvious problems, the open-office model has continued to encroach on workers across the country. Now, about 70 percent of U.S. offices have no or low partitions, according to the International Facility Management Association. Silicon Valley has been the leader in bringing down the dividers. Google, Yahoo, eBay, Goldman Sachs and American Express are all adherents. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg enlisted famed architect Frank Gehry to design the largest open floor plan in the world, housing nearly 3,000 engineers. And as a businessman, Michael Bloomberg was an early adopter of the open-space trend, saying it promoted transparency and fairness. He famously carried the model into city hall when he became mayor of New York, making “the Bullpen” a symbol of open communication and accessibility to the city’s chief.One more reason we should be allowed to work from home!…

…But employers are getting a false sense of improved productivity. A 2013 study found that many workers in open offices are frustrated by distractions that lead to poorer work performance. Nearly half of the surveyed workers in open offices said the lack of sound privacy was a significant problem for them and more than 30 percent complained about the lack of visual privacy. Meanwhile, “ease of interaction” with colleagues — the problem that open offices profess to fix — was cited as a problem by fewer than 10 percent of workers in any type of office setting. In fact, those with private offices wereleast likely to identify their ability to communicate with colleagues as an issue. In a previous study, researchers concluded that “the loss of productivity due to noise distraction … was doubled in open-plan offices compared to private offices.”

But wait for it…

Why is all of this Open Office hating coming out right now? Are open offices really that bad? My own opinion is that the office furniture industry is truly behind all of this anyway. Every decade or so, they need to sell new furniture and the way to do that is to tell executives that a new design will give them magical productivity gains and super happy employees! Just buy our new desk and chair!

I suspect this round of Open Office hating is coming from another corner of the universe. Can you guess? So, closed offices don’t work. You don’t get collaboration. Open offices don’t work, because you don’t get privacy. So, what are we HR Pros to do?

Oh, I have an idea, came from the corner, of the employees who just don’t’ feel cozy enough at work! The NEW research says that Working From Home is the real answer to all of our problems! Yep. Open offices suck because working from home is soooo much better!

Did you see that coming?

There are seven-year-old kids in China making $100 Nikes by candle light, and amazingly their productivity goes up every day! Be careful about getting pulled down the rabbit hole of what next great office design will ‘fix’ your company. Everyone has an agenda. Your employees who really would rather just work from home. The office supply companies who need to push product. The HR executive who needs productivity increases to show the board or at least, a reason we aren’t getting them!

What is the magical office design after work from home crashes? I hear working from the beach in Cayman really, really increases productivity!

2015 Top Post: Sometimes A Job Isn’t Worth It

Posted on December 2, 2015 by Tim Sackett

I’m on vacation this week, so you’re getting a best of week from The Project. These are the most read posts of 2015 to this point. Enjoy!

Linds Redding, a New Zealand-based art director who worked at BBDO and Saatchi & Saatchi, died last month at 52 from an inoperable esophageal cancer. Turns out Linds didn’t really like his old job and mad hours he spent creating a successful career. Here is what Linds wrote before he died:

“I think you’re all f—— mad. Deranged. So disengaged from reality it’s not even funny. It’s a f—— TV commercial. Nobody gives a s—.

This has come as quite a shock I can tell you. I think, I’ve come to the conclusion that the whole thing was a bit of a con. A scam. An elaborate hoax.

Countless late nights and weekends, holidays, birthdays, school recitals and anniversary dinners were willingly sacrificed at the altar of some intangible but infinitely worthy higher cause. It would all be worth it in the long run…

This was the con. Convincing myself that there was nowhere I’d rather be was just a coping mechanism. I can see that now. It wasn’t really important. Or of any consequence at all really. How could it be. We were just shifting product. Our product, and the clients. Just meeting the quota. Feeding the beast as I called it on my more cynical days.

So was it worth it?

Well of course not. It turns out it was just advertising. There was no higher calling.”

When faced with death, I wonder how many of us will look back on all the time and effort we put into our career and will feel the same?

That all being said, sometimes I think a job might be worth it as well. Here’s the other side of the coin. I frequently see articles and blog posts, recently, written by people who have given up their careers to travel the world. It all seems so glamorous and adventurous. Until you realize you had a career and job to pay for all those glamorous adventures! From Adweek, “The Couple Who Quit Their Ad Jobs to Travel the World Ended Up Poor and Scrubbing ToiletsThe uglier side of a year-long creative journey”:

“You remember Chanel Cartell and Stevo Dirnberger, the South African couple who quit their agency jobs this year to travel the world anddocument the experience. It sounded like a dream, and the lovely Instagram photos have made it look like one.

But halfway through their year-long odyssey (they’re currently in Athens, having traveled 25,000 kilometers so far), they’ve posted a reality check on their blog—a post titled “Why We Quit Our Jobs In Advertising To Scrub Toilets”—in which they share “the uglier side of our trip.” It turns out that following one’s dream—while working odd jobs in exchange for room and board—involves a lot of dirty work, and more than a few tears.

“The budget is really tight, and we are definitely forced to use creativity (and small pep talks) to solve most of our problems (and the mild crying fits),” Cartell writes. “Don’t let the bank of gorgeous photography fool you. Nuh uh. So far, I think we’ve tallied 135 toilets scrubbed, 250 kilos of cow dung spread, 2 tons of rocks shoveled, 60 meters of pathway laid, 57 beds made, and I cannot even remember how many wine glasses we’ve polished.

“You see, to come from the luxuries we left behind in Johannesburg … we are now on the opposite end of the scale. We’re toilet cleaners, dog poop scoopers, grocery store merchandisers and rock shovelers.”

We work for a reason. Your reasons might be vastly different than my reasons, but we all have reasons. I hope if I look death in the face I won’t regret my choices to work and create a successful career. I’ve missed my fair share of school events and sporting events that my kids have participated in. I’ve missed many of their most joyful and sad moments. Those I already regret. What I won’t regret is that I work to allow my family to have so many of these moments.

I lived poor. I lived with a single mother who wasn’t quite sure how she was going to pay for dinner that night. I work because I never wanted my family to feel this anxiety. Sometimes a job is worth it, sometimes it isn’t. It’s all up to you to decide, though.

2015 Top Post: Top 25 Rap Lyrics That Shaped My Leadership Style

Posted on December 1, 2015 by Tim Sackett

I’m on vacation this week, so you’re getting a best of week from The Project. These are the most read posts of 2015 to this point. Enjoy!

Last year I did blog series on The Top 25 Rap Lyrics that shaped my leadership style. The posts, individually, still get clicked a ton, so I decided to do a compilation of the 25 posts to make it easier for new readers to find all 25 (I know my family is really proud of me right now!). Taken out of context of the original post, you might be asking yourself “How the hell did this shape his leadership style?” If you find yourself asking that, click through the link to read the explanation!

Here you go – The Top 25 Rap Lyrics That Shaped My Leadership Style with links to the original posts:

1. “It’s like the more money we come across, the more problems we see” -Notorious B.I.G.

2. “Today I didn’t even have to use my A.K., I got to say it was a good day” -Ice Cube

3. “What does it take to be number 1? Two is not a winner and three nobody remembers.” -Nelly

4. “I’m not a businessman. I’m a business, man.” -Jay-Z

5. “When I wake up, people take up, mostly all of my time. I’m not singin’, phone keep ringin’, so I make up a rhyme.” -RUN DMC

6. “It’s funny how someone else’s success brings pain.” -Drake

7. “Success is my drug of choice…” – 50 Cent

8. “Forgive, but don’t forget.” -2Pac

9. “True happiness is not acquired, and you won’t find it on sale.” -Outkast

10. “At exactly which point do you realize, that life without knowledge is death in disguise.” -Talib Kweli

11. “You’re young and dumb and quick with the tongue.” -Kool Mo Dee