Category Archives: Job Seeker Advice

New Money in HR

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My wife and I got to spend some time in the Cayman Islands this past week.  It was great! I highly recommend going if you have the means.

You know what I saw a lot of in Cayman? New money!

New money is people who aren’t from money.  They weren’t raised around money, so they don’t know how to act with money.  They tend to stick out around people who grew up with money.  I’m neither new or old money, but it was fascinating to watch how the two differ.

It started from the moment I was going through customs to get into Cayman.  New money complains about having to wait in line to get through customs with the common folk. Old money didn’t wait in line, as they have been here before and knew the way around line.

My wife and I went to swim with the dolphins. We ran into new money at the facility. One of the workers was helping a family with three daughters and showing them some wildlife at the center. A few of us walked up soon after he started, and he politely asked us to wait. The girls were taking turns holding parrots and such, and getting their picture.  This new money lady walked right up to the worker and said, “I want to hold the parrot and get my picture!”

The worker kindly obliged, and she quickly departed, on to push around the next person. Caymanians are used to new money.

New money buys a $150 polo shirt in the lobby store because walking across the street to a shop that has the same shirt for $75 would be an inconvenience.  New money makes you feel like it’s completely normal to pay $50 for a cheeseburger and fries.

New money seems annoyed that they aren’t treated better, because they have money. New money is loud, impatient and rude. Old money waits in the back, for the crowd to clear, understanding, because they have money, they’ll get what they want eventually, and treating people kindly will get them exactly what they want.

I heard someone last week say HR is the new IT. Referring to how power is shifting out of IT and moving into HR because of how difficult it is to get great talent.  Great technology is becoming easier to obtain and work with, great talent is becoming harder to obtain and work with.

This phenomenon is shifting some organizational power to HR.  In organizations power equals money.

HR pros will have a choice to make.  Do you want to be new money or old money?  You think it’s an easy choice, but it’s not. Money and power make people do stupid things.

Leveraging your new found power for good will be one of the hardest things you’ll ever do in your HR career.  Those who do it successfully are old money kind of folks. Those who use it to push around their organization in ways that satisfy only themselves are the kind of people who push over little girls to get their photo taken with a bird.

Short-timer’s Rules and Guidelines to Getting Fired

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You know what happens when someone is on the path to being fired?  They start doing all kinds of strange things.  They’re actually fairly easy to spot, and if you follow these rules and guidelines you will be able to pick them out, or know if it’s you that is about to be terminated.

In the HR game, we call these people about to be fired or leave our organization, ‘Short-timers’.  I also like to refer to them as ‘dead employee walking’, because so many hiring managers will know for months they want to terminate an employee, but they don’t.

Instead, they begin to treat them like they’re dead.  They ignore them, stop giving them work, ‘forget’ to invite them to meetings, etc.  Almost like they’re dead.

Regardless of what you want to call them, I think we owe it to give them some rules about what to do and not to do when they hit a period of their soon-to-be-over employment.

Short-timer Rules and Guidelines:

  1. Don’t start working harder. You’ve already been shot, you just don’t know it yet.  You working harder to try and save yourself just looks sad and pathetic. You had a chance to save your job, now is not the time.
  1. Don’t start talking about how you’ve been wronged. You actually might be wronged, but no one wants to hear it, and me talking to you puts me in your camp, and I don’t want to be in dead employee walking camp.
  1. Do start lining up references from those who still like you. You’re going to need references from your last employer. Do that now. It’s hard to say no to your face. It’s easy to ignore your email and phone calls after you’ve left.
  1. Do start slowly take personal effects home, little by little, so not to be noticed. This way when the big announce happens you aren’t asking people to help you carry stuff out to our car.
  1. Do start looking for a job. It’s one million times easier (that’s an exact figure from my research) to find a job when you have a job than when you don’t have a job.
  1. Don’t profess your love to a co-worker on your way out. It’s really not a great romantic time to do something like this. “Hey, Tina! I’m out of here! But I’ve always wanted to hook up, call me!” Yeah, just what Tina needs, an out of work slacker to add into her life.
  1. Do clean out your computer files and delete all search histories. You know what we do when you leave? We look at your search history on your computer and laugh. Laugh loudly and often. We don’t know exactly why you were searching for an all-black toilet seat, but it’s funny not to know!
  1. Don’t start trying to take other people down with you. Here’s the deal; you’re about to get fired. You are trying to bring others down with you won’t work because you have no credibility.  In fact, it will probably just quicken your exit.
  1. Don’t burn bridges. It’s a small world when it comes to professions and employment. That boss you tell off today might be the same executive that stops you from being hired someplace else down the road.
  1. Do burn all of your corporate logo wear. Yeah, like you’re really going to wear your old companies gear when you got fired! No, you’re not.  Burn it.  Have a party and dance around the flames.  It’s cathartic, in a way, to rid yourself of these signs and symbols of a part of your life that is now over.

2 Reason Men Get Hired More Than Women

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The New York Times had an article regarding hiring practices and succession practices at Google, and G*d knows if Google is doing it, it must be important, and we all must try and do the same thing. What I liked about this article was it didn’t necessarily look at practices and processes, it looked at data. The data found that Google, like almost every other large company, does a crappy job hiring and promoting women.

Shocking, I know, if you’re a man! We had no idea this was going on! In America of all places… Beyond the obvious, though, Google was able to dig into the data and find out the whys and make some practical changes that I think most companies can implement, and that I totally agree with.  From the article:

“Google’s spreadsheets, for example, showed that some women who applied for jobs did not make it past the phone interview. The reason was that the women did not flaunt their achievements, so interviewers judged them unaccomplished.

Google now asks interviewers to report candidates’ answers in more detail. Google also found that women who turned down job offers had interviewed only with men. Now, a woman interviewing at Google will meet other women during the hiring process.

A result: More women are being hired.”

Here are two selection facts that impact both men and women:

1.  We like to surround ourselves with people who we like, which usually means in most cases people who are similar to ourselves.

2. We tend not to want to brag about our accomplishments, but our society has made it more acceptable for men to brag.

This has a major impact to your selection, and most of you are doing nothing about it.  It’s very common that if you run simple demographics for your company, ANY COMPANY, you’ll see that the percentage of your female employees does not come close to the percentage of your female leadership.

Why is that?

Here are two things you can do to help make the playing field more level in your organization:

1. Have women interview women.  Sounds a bit sexist in a way, but if you want women to get hired into leadership positions you can’t have them going up against males being interviewed by males because the males will almost always feel more comfortable with another male candidate. Reality sucks, buy a helmet.

2. Ask specific questions regarding accomplishments and take detailed notes. Studies have found woman don’t get hired or promoted because they don’t “sell” or brag enough about their accomplishments giving their male counterparts a leg up, because the males making the hiring decisions now have “ammunition” to justify their decision to hire the male.

Let’s face it, Google is doing it, so now we all have to do it.  What would we do without best practices…(maybe innovate and create new better practices – but I digress…).

T3 – Honeit

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T3 – Talent Tech Tuesday – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on T3 – send me a note.

This week on T3 I’m taking a look at the digital interview platform Honeit (pronounced “Hone It”, as in hone your skills).  Honeit comes at the interview process from a bit of a different angle.  There is a segment of HR Technology that is originally started not to help companies, but for helping job seekers.  If you think about where we’ve been the last ten years, job seekers needed help and a bunch of well intentioned people had great technology ideas to help those folks.

Honeit comes at the interview a bit from that angle.  How can we help job seekers share their skills with employers, but what does “top talent” want and expect from top companies.  Many of assume that top talent wants to interview digitally on their own time, when it is convenient for them. 90% of the digital interview space is designed around this concept. Post a job with a digital interview/screen link, and people will click through and ‘tape’ their responses to your screening questions.  Honeit feels, and I tend to agree, top talent wants live interaction with a real person from your company.

The Honeit interview platform is designed whereas the candidate and the organization have access to their taped, live interview and can have outside professionals give them feedback on how they feel the candidate can interview better, differently, etc. The company can send the interview on to hiring managers, other recruiters, save it for later, etc.  The candidate can use ‘their’ interview to get better at interviewing, and get real feedback from real talent acquisition pros.  Plus, job seekers get an unique URL to use to help share and promote themselves based on their results.

5 Things I Really Like About Honeit: 

1. Easy to use dashboard and a clean UI gets you up and running in minutes.  There isn’t some big implementation to get this off the ground and running.

2. Build interview scripts and questions for hiring managers to use, and the system basically shows you if they’re using it or not because it’s tied to the taped answers of the live interview.  The system time stamps each question and answer during the interview so you can automatically jump to specific Q and A’s, and also share specific Q and A’s without having to share the entire interview.

3. Some HR and TA pros will hate this, but I love that a job seeker can decide to buy up services in Honeit to get themselves better at interviewing, and spend time, live, with a real person, in a real company, who is working in Talent Acquisition. Plus, the job seeker can get ‘verified’ by these individuals on skills, and use that to help promote themselves to other companies.

4. The live versus taped screen I’m sure is up for debate. You’ll get more volume with taped screens.  I have a feeling the better the talent, the more personal touch they want. This feeling is based on twenty years of pimping great talent.

5. We all suck at interviewing, most of our hiring managers suck worse. Honeit really gives you a quality control mechanism to help get your hiring managers better, by allowing you to actually hear both sides of a real, live interview. This tool can give you invaluable coaching material.

Honeit is fairly new, and still working on perfecting what they have.  That’s a benefit for you, because new companies tend to be inexpensive companies and want to work with you more and give you more one on one attention.  We have a client we are going to test Honeit out with, and I’ll follow up and let you know how our test works out.

The Real Reason for Long Term Unemployed

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In 1979 America had a major energy crisis, mostly blamed on the Iranian government reducing exports and inflating oil prices. This caused the country to go into a prolonged recession.  Our own government made this worse, by trying to help, in changing monetary policy, which knowingly drove up inflation to incredible levels.

The early 1980’s recession caused many people out of jobs, and many were unemployed for a long period.  Long term unemployed isn’t new to our country.  There is one major difference between the early 1980’s and today.

The internet.

From the New York Times:

“technology has made unemployment less lonely. Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University, argues that the Internet allows men to entertain themselves and find friends and sexual partners at a much lower cost than did previous generations.”

You see in 1980 when a man was unemployed he had nothing to do but sit and think about being unemployed.  He could tinker around the house, but eventually that list of “To Dos” got done, and all you had to keep you company was the endless thought of “I’m unemployed”.

Today, you have an endless thought of “well, only one more click” which sends you down a rabbit hole you won’t come out of for hours!

Like most Republicans, I’m just going to blame the internet for this problem.

I remember my Dad forcing me out of the house to find a job.  I had to physically walk into a location to request an application, fill it out, hand it back to the manager, and see what happens next.  I also had to walk to school, in the snow, uphill, both ways.

We all know, now, no one walks in an employer and applies.  We sit at home and apply to five thousand jobs and get around four thousand five hundred email do not reply ‘we received your application’ responses (500 companies still haven’t figured out that reply functionality on their ATS).

I would love a study of the long term unemployed that would ask that one question:

“How many times have you physically gone to a place of employment and applied in person for a position?”

I would guess that number would be very low.  I’m not saying that just doing this would solve long term unemployment.  It might help some individuals get a job.  I’m saying the internet makes it too easy for you to stay unemployed.

Turn off House of Cards on Netflix.  Take a shower. Get a new haircut. Put one some clean clothes and let’s go visit some people. It’s hard to do, which means not many are doing it, which means you will have an advantage over almost everyone.  The internet won’t solve your problem. In fact, it’s probably making your problem worse.

Privacy is the New Candidate Red Flag

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Have you interviewed anyone recently, and haven’t been able to find anything about them online?

No LinkedIn profile. No Facebook. No Twitter. No Instagram. Google even seem to turn up nothing. It was like the person didn’t exist, yet there she was right in front of you, with a resume, work history, and educational transcripts. A living, breathing, walking ghost.

A social ghost, to be sure.

I had this happen a couple of weeks ago. It was disconcerting to say the least.  Of course, I knew this when I asked the person to come in to interview. It was one of the main reasons I asked her to come in.  It was like I found this mythical creature, this interview unicorn. There was no way I was passing this up.

Besides the resume with verified job history, valid driver’s license, address, educational records and a credit history, it was as if this person never existed.

I think the kids call this a “Catfish”, or at least thats what I expected to have come interview with me. This ‘Susan’ would come in and really be a ‘Samuel’! I’ve been in the game a long time, ‘Susan’ wasn’t going to pull one over on me.

I once had a friend who told me he gave up TV.  I didn’t really believe him, either.  Let’s be real, no one gives up TV.  And, as usual, I was right.  He gave away his TV, but he didn’t give away his laptop, his tablet and his smartphone. He was still watching, trying to act like he saved the fucking world by giving away his TV device. Like we don’t know you have twenty other devices in your house to watch shows on.

But, I digress, back to my social ghost, Susan. (of course, Susan isn’t her real name I changed that, I’m a pro, her real name is Jennifer)

I asked Susan the question we would all want to ask in this circumstance: “Susan can you tell me why you hate America?”

She seemed perplexed by this, almost like she didn’t comprehend what I was asking her, but I knew better.  She knew exactly where I was going with my line of questioning.  Why would a person choose to lead a life of anonymity, when a fully functioning narcissistic life is easily within her reach?

I showed her how if you Googled “Tim Sackett” I, soley, was the first 127 pages of the search results, working towards 130. I explained how I ‘socially’ erased another “Tim Sackett”, the Truck Driver Chaplin, almost from existence. Almost like he never stopped at a truck stop along I80 attempting to save lives in the name of Jesus.  It was a life’s work. My life’s work. I could tell she was impressed.

At the point where I had just about cracked her, she softly spoke one word, “privacy”, spilled from her lips like a small newborn logging onto Instagram video for the first time.

Privacy.  I knew there was something about her I didn’t like.

The interview ended.  So, did her chances of ever getting hired by me.

No One Is Waiting To Discover You

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I’m a recruiter.  I search for talent every day.  Basically, I’m never not on the outlook for talent.  Of course I’m doing this at work, but I also do it while shopping, while eating, while I’m at the movies, while I’m on vacation, etc.

You see, I never know when I’m going to discover a talented person and have the exact right opportunity, with the exact right company and it all fits together.

But, if you’re waiting for me, to discover you, you’ll be waiting forever.

I don’t discover anyone who isn’t working to be discovered.   I’m not knocking on closed doors where it looks like no one is home.  It’s like trick or treating, I’m only going to the houses with the lights on.

I hear from a lot of people who are willing to change jobs, or are open to new opportunities.  Unfortunately, almost all of these people are waiting to be discovered.  They aren’t actively doing anything to show me who they are and why I should be looking for them.

Their argument is they don’t want their current employer to know they’re looking.  My argument back is that isn’t the best way to be discovered anyway!  Hiring managers love passive candidates, people who aren’t looking.  You can be a passively-active candidate without floating your resume all over God’s green earth and changing your LinkedIn headline to “Now Open to New Opportunities!”

Get active in your industry.  Get active in the city and community you want to live.  Let your personal network know you would be open to something great, and by-the-way this is what I think something great would look like.

We are coming into a decade where there will be more jobs than qualified people.  You can have some great options if people are aware of who you are.  Just don’t think there is some magical fairy that will discover you sitting at your desk doing your normal job in the third row, second cube, fifth floor on the seventh building in the office park, the world doesn’t work that way. This isn’t Hollywood, this is main street.

 

How To Get a Great Job in 2015

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Last week I got a call from an old work friend. He wanted to have lunch.  He just left a position and was in transition.  Not a bad or negative job loss, just parted ways.  When you get to a certain executive point in your career, it’s rare that bad terminations take place. It’s usually, “hey, we like you, but we really want to go another direction, and we know you don’t want to go that direction, so let’s just shake hands and call it a day, here’s a big fat check.”

Executives get this.  For the most part there isn’t hard feelings, like when you were young and lost a job. I usually find that the organization the person is leaving from are super complementary, and usually takes the blame for the change.  Executives in corporate America are like NFL coaches. You get hired with the understanding that one day you’ll be fired.  It’s not that you know less, or aren’t going to be successful in your career, it’s just that the organization needs change, and you’re part of that change.

Welcome to the show, kid.

My friend decided that he was going to find his next position not through posting for positions online, or trolling corporate career pages, he was going to have lunches.  About two per week, with past work friends. Let’s connect, no pressure, we already know each other and I want to catch up.

You see, in 2015 you don’t find great jobs by filling out applications in ATSs and uploading resumes. You get great jobs because of the relationships and personal capital you’ve built up over your career.  Having lunch and reconnecting turn on a relationship machine. I believe that people, innately, want to help other people. When a friend comes to you with a situation, and you have something to offer or help, you will do that.

The problem is most people who are looking for great jobs don’t do this. They lock themselves in their home office and apply to a thousand jobs online and get upset when nothing happens. Great jobs aren’t filled by ATSs and corporate recruiters.  Great jobs are fill through relationships. Every single one of them.

Want to find a great job in 2015?

Go out to lunch.

One Surefire Way To Get The Job You Love

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Everyone wants a job they love.  Everyone. The priorities might change from person to person, but if you asked someone, do you want a job you love, or a job you hate, 100% of people will give you the ‘Love’ answer.

There are some caveats. I might want a job that I love, but I also need a job that provides adequate pay and benefits.  I’d love to a professional puppy petter, but I just don’t see anyone putting a high value on that job.  I might want a job I love, but I also want to be close to my friends and family. While I would love working with injured dolphins on a remote island in the pacific, without my friends and family, that job would get old quick.

The one surefire way you get a job that you love is to want ‘that’ job for the right reasons.

Not because this ‘new’ job is better pay or benefits. Not because it’s in a warmer climate, or that my girlfriend lives nearby.  That is not how you get a job you love.  You’re just getting a job that fits some of your life criteria.

To get a job you love, you have to want it because that’s what you’ve always wanted to do your entire life.  You have a path that shows you’ve wanted it your entire life. You’ve been working towards this job. If you walk the path, you have a much better chance of getting to the end.

I would love to coach the Los Angles Lakers.  But, let’s face it, while I’ve wanted this most of my entire adult life, I’ve never put the work into pursuing this love job.  I didn’t bust my butt coming up the coaching ranks. I wasn’t willing to travel around the world pursuing this passion. I wasn’t willing to make peanuts for years as I got experience.

The problem is people just want a job they love without the path.  It doesn’t work that way.  99.9% of people don’t fall into jobs they love.  They might start a job not knowing if they’ll love it, and go on the path, and find out that they actually do love it.

Want a job you love?  Work for it. Show people that’s what you want through your actions and efforts.  That’s the surefire way to get a job you love.

Double Your Chances for Promotion in Two Easy Steps

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I had a kid reach out to me last week and ask how he could get promoted at his current company.  I call him a kid, because he was probably 20 years younger than I, so I’ve reached that point in my life I can start calling adult professionals, ‘kids’.

Laurie Ruettimann and I had this talk just a couple weeks ago, right after she turned 40. I told her, “I’ve finally reached that point in my life where I have 20 years of solid work experience, but I feel bad about telling people that number!” 20 years of experience sounds old!  I remember when I had five years of work experience and I would try and stretch it to 7 or 8 years of experience by adding in college jobs!

Now, I have the legit experience and I want to make it sound like it’s ten years!

So, this kid wants to get promoted.  He’s got just under 5 years of experience and he’s itching for more.  We’ve all been there. Here’s what I told him:

“You need to do two things in this order: 

1st – Put together a self-development plan with activities and goals and a timeline. Show that you’re working on your ‘opportunity’ areas. (Opportunity areas are weaknesses for the GenXers reading this) 

2nd – You need to make your direct supervisor keenly aware of this plan, and (the most important part) you need to ask that supervisor for help in accomplishing your plan.  Have very specific things your boss can do to help you complete your development plan.” 

We then talked about what some of those things would look like based on what he told me he thought his ‘opportunity’ areas were.

Bosses love to promote people they believe they’ve helped and mentored.  It’s a great ego stroke, and they get bonus points from the organization because they are ‘developing’ talent.  Bosses don’t get credit for hiring great talent.  They get credit for promoting great talent.

It’s Organizational Behavior 101 at it’s finest.

It doesn’t have to be very sophisticated.  Bosses like to promote people that they believe are engaged in their job and the company.  By you taking the initiative to have your own development plan, and not wait for them to offer it up to you, and by you asking them for help, you just doubled your chances of getting promoted.

There are a lot of moving factors in anything like this, but if you are working for someone who is respected in the organization, and you have an above average performance as compared to others in your work group, this will almost always play out well for you.

Want to get promoted?  It only takes two steps.