Category Archives: Learning

The Power of Your Network is Still the Most Valuable Thing You Own!

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If you’re even a casual reader of this blog you know I have three sons. Two of those sons are in college. Being that my life’s work has been in HR and Recruiting you better believe they understand the importance of good grades and internships!

Being the Dad I am I thought it would be a good idea to use my network to try and help my boys get an internship. Let’s be honest, this is how most recruiting still works today. It’s about who you are, combined with who you know. My kids know me and a few hundred friends and family, 99.9% of which are absolutely no help in finding them an internship.

They’re a lot like most kids, besides this one exception.

I know a ‘few’ more people than they do. I’ve been writing for about ten years now. I’ve spent a career building a network. So, I put a very simple message out on LinkedIn. Here it is:

You see the number, right!? 99,973 views of this post as of me writing this post!

I don’t care who you are, or what your network is on LinkedIn, 99K views is a lot! I know a bunch of marketing pros who would give me their left arm for 99K views of anything they put out!

The outcome is still undetermined. Both boys have had interviews, so I’m confident they’ll find something wonderful. I’ve had amazing friends, peers, and people I’ve never met, reach out to help. Some with actual positions. Some with other connections who might have something. Others with just words of encouragement.

I was overwhelmed with gratitude.

When you write a free blog for ten years you really don’t have any idea what the ultimate outcome will be. I don’t ask for much of my network. I really didn’t expect much from the post above. I sent it out into the world and magic came back. It’s very cool!

Some learnings I’m taking away from this experience:

– LinkedIn for how much we love to hate it sometimes can be very, very powerful tool for networking.

– When a post goes viral, you are never prepared! If I didn’t reply back to you I’m sorry, it was unintentional!

– The next time you decide to ‘ignore’ a LinkedIn connection request, think about how that person might help your network.

I had a friend point out that some folks might be upset over this. The reason my kids will get an internship is because of ‘who’ they know (me, there dad). They have the advantage of having a network that can deliver these opportunities. What about all those kids that don’t have that same ‘privilege’. It’s not fair.

I can’t change the fact that as a father I want to help my kids get every opportunity they can. I didn’t do their homework and take their tests, that’s all on them. I don’t sit in on the interview, that’s all on them. I help out people not related to me every day in the best way I can. I’m not going to apologize for helping my own kids find a job. That’s just silly.

FYI – still on the outlook for a summer Accounting internship for a Junior Accounting Major with a 3.85+ GPA, who is a student-athlete playing college baseball on scholarship. It turns out most Accounting internships are in the Winter and Spring during tax season. He can’t do that with his athletic commitment. So, if you know of anything, let me know!

9 Ways IBM (and the rest of us) Should Be Reinventing Talent @IBMWatsonTalent

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Amber Grewal is the Head of Global TA for IBM. It’s a big job. She posted on LinkedIn recently and gave her 9 ways IBM is reinventing recruiting. It’s pretty good. I’m not sure she wrote it. My experience is with giant corporations that they rarely would ever allow one person to post something so big on a social platform, but I’m sure she got in her ideas with some ‘corporate’ wordsmithing, either way, I liked it.

I like when large organizations put HR and TA leaders out in front of the brand. That’s always a risk. I like that IBM is taking that risk. They’re a big player in the HCM/TA tech space, and if you want my attention, give me less PR and marketing pitches, and more practitioner know-how!

Here is the infographic that “Amber” put together:

I’ll go through and give you my comments on all 9:

1. Upskill the Recruiting Function – Oh hell yes! The main problem with corporate recruiting is very little actual recruiting actually takes place. A whole lot of administering the recruiting function takes place. When need to flip those two things!

2. Horizontally Source – This is the Talent Pipeline. The problem with maintaining Talent Pipelines is they’re very expensive. I would rather see an On-demand sourcing function, than a pipeline function, but I like that Amber to be trying to marry the two in a ‘ready-now’ fashion.

3. Work Agile – I think what Amber is saying, and I love it, is not all requisitions are created equal. Some jobs we fill are more important and have more impact on the organization. Yes, yes they do! So, do those things first and do them fast, to maximize the impact!

4. Create a Recruiting-First Culture – This would be my #1. Talent Acquisition doesn’t own recruiting. Hiring managers own recruiting. I can help you staff your department, function, location, etc., but ultimately, you as the leader must own it. If you can get here in your organization, you’ll be great at talent acquisition. The next step is then getting every single employee to understand their role and significance in constantly attracting talent to the organization.

5. Trust-based Hiring – Yeah, I’ve got nothing. Honestly, this is a large, enterprise-level organizational issue. Here’s what happens. Manager A has a great talent, but that talent is being underutilized in their group. Manager B desperately needs the talent Manager A has. Manager A should, for the betterment of the organization, give up their talent to Manager B, but they don’t because they believe they won’t get the talent they need in return. This happens constantly in giant organizations, and it sucks.

6. Proactively Source – Maybe a good first step here would be to first ‘actually’ source! 😉 I like that Amber is focusing her team on certain things the organization needs. Hey, we suck at hiring females in tech roles! Cool, let’s make that a priority and specifically use a rifle approach to go out and get more females in tech roles. That’s just good recruiting. Might want to work with HR to ensure those females will feel like they actually belong as well, when they get into those roles or you’ll never get off that treadmill.

7. Cognitively Assist Candidates – Thanks for joining Marketing! This is where an LI post becomes a commercial and I would bet my entire salary (as a writer) that Amber didn’t actually have this on her original list! This one is supposed to be about Candidate Experience and I’m sure that’s what Amber had, but this is where Watson got shoved in. Not saying that’s bad, but it doesn’t sound like a practitioner put #7 together.

8. Personalize Offers – More Watson, but I will say personalization across the recruiting process is the key to reinventing recruiting. We all want to be recruited like a five star running back to Alabama. We want that experience. It doesn’t matter what role you get hired for, you want to feel like the most important person in the world to that company.

9. Interview with Cognitive – Okay, more Watson, but this is where I’m a huge fan! Very, very, very rarely will you go wrong when hiring smarter people who can process information faster. This doesn’t mean hiring only people who have a GPA of 3.5 or higher. There isn’t a ton of correlation between GPA and actual cognitive processing speed. Go find great cognitive pre-employment assessments and hire smart, it won’t let you down. Apparently, IBM has something like this called Watson or something, check it out.

Amber, thanks for putting this together! It’s a really strong plan for other TA leaders to follow!

 

The Most Valuable Skill Set of the Future Will be…

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Common sense.

We’ve lost most of it already.

We can no longer see both sides of a situation. There is only right and wrong, as interpreted by each individual, not actual right or wrong. That’s not reality, but that’s how we are reacting to most things that happen in our life.

The world is coming unglued because we lack common sense. We only see the extreme edges of everything. We no longer work to see both sides, or any sides other than our own, of a situation. I am right. You are wrong. Go kill yourself.

The big problem is we no this is wrong. How do we know this? We tell every person who doesn’t agree with us! The hardest thing to do in your life is being able to see the side of others. It’s super easy to only believe in the stupid stuff you already believe in.

This won’t go away because 2017 is over. What we are feeling had nothing to do with which year it is. It has everything to do with our lack of basic common sense to understand there is no right or wrong at the edges, just extremes. The answer is in the middle when you come together to find that common ground.

I not really looking to hire a certain educational skill set any longer. I’m looking to hire people that still have a shred of common sense left in them. It’s getting harder and harder to find that skill.

7 Sure Ways to Fail as a HR Leader

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It’s tough being a Leader these days!  You have all these boomers retiring and taking their typewriters and knowledge with them, you have all theses X’ers who think they are now the second coming, the GenY’s and the Millennial’s who have been told they are the second coming, and now we have these Generation Zs who think they can work from where ever since they grew up with a smartphone and an iPad in their crib.

On top of all this, somehow in the last 10 years executives decided HR is no longer HR, but now we are these business partners, so on top of having to take care of all these people issues, we now have to be concerned with business issues, teach our leaders how to be leaders, continue to train our workforce to stay current, fight off talent sharks from our competition, make sure the corporate picnic still runs smoothly and oh by the way can you put a nice internal blog post together for the CEO and make it real “peopleish”.

I get it, it’s hard being a leader in HR, that’s why I’m going to help you out and give you some tips on things to stay away from:

1. Think of yourself or your company as “the” industry leader. As soon as you do, someone will knock you off.

2. Identify so strongly with the company that you no longer have a clear boundary between your personal interests and the corporation’s interests. Yes, you should be committed, but don’t be “committed” Too often leaders doing this fail to differentiate their personal agenda and the corporate agenda and start empire building.

3. Have all the answers.  This is tough because it’s common leadership training that we all know: use your people, surround yourself with people better than you, make group decisions, etc.  But until you put your butt in that seat you never realize how many things will come your way, where people want a decision and they are unwilling to make it. So they look to you for the answer. Don’t get sucked into this trap. Pushback and make them bring you solutions.

4. Hunt down and Kill those who don’t support you. Don’t think this happens?! Look at turnover numbers of departments when a new leader takes over. They are almost always higher than those of the organization as a whole.

5. Become obsessed with the company image.  Your company image is hugely important, but it is not the most important thing you have going on. Make sure your operations match the image you want to create, not the other way around.

6. Underestimate or take obstacles for granted.  As a leader you want to be confident during hard and challenging times, but don’t let yourself get fooled into believing your own confidence will get you through.  Having a clear understanding of the reality you are facing, and being able to communicate that without fear to your team, with a plan of action, is key.

7. Stubbornly rely on what you’ve always done.  “Well, when I was the leader at GE we did it this way…” Look, this isn’t the 80’s and this isn’t GE. Might it work? Sure. But be open to new ways of doing things, while being confident of what you know will work. Don’t put yourself or your organization in jeopardy, but be willing to try new things when time and circumstance allow.

Adapted from The Seven Habits of Spectacularly Unsuccessful Executives in Forbes by Mike Myatt

Quality of Hire is NOT a Talent Acquisition Measure of Success!

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I was looking at LinkedIn’s annual Global Recruiting Trends 2017 report and it had some great information.  I have to give LI credit, this report, each year, has some really great information that always makes me think!  This year’s report was no different, and one stat struck me as really telling:

When Talent Leaders were asked: “What is the way you measure your recruiting team’s performance today?“

They said:

  1. Quality of Hire metrics (hiring manager measure not a TA measure – my opinion)
  2. Time to Hire (the single worse measure of all time – my opinion)
  3. Hiring Manager Satisfaction (has no correlation to whether or not TA is actually good or not – my opinion)

I hate all of these answers!!!  In fact, these answers are so bad it makes me question the viability of the future of Talent Acquisition!

You know what?  Quality of Hire is an Illusion for about 99% of organizations!  Most of us have no freaking idea how to actually measure the quality of hire, or that what we are actually measuring doesn’t haven’t the faintest correlation to actual quality of hire.

So, why is this interesting to me?

It shows me that TA Leaders still don’t have the guts to use real metrics and analytics to measure the performance of their teams!  Using a subjective, at best, measure, like Quality of Hire, allows them to continue to just make up what they ‘feel’ performance is, and one that doesn’t truly hold themselves or their teams accountable.

If you think this isn’t you, tell me how you actually measure quality of hire of your employees?  It’s very complex to even come up with something I could argue is an actual quality of hire metric!  Most organizations will do things like measure 90-day retention as a quality of hire. “Oh, look, they stayed 90 days! Way to go, recruiters, you’re hiring quality!” No, they’re not! They’re just hiring bodies that decided to stay around 90 days!

Quality of hire metrics only works if you are actually measuring the performance of your new hires to the performance of those employees you already have.  This measure, then, becomes one that you can’t even measure until you have a true measure of performance (which is a whole other issue!) of both the new hire and your current employees. Also, you have to give that new hire, probably a year, to truly see what kind of performer they are in your environment.

How many organizations are waiting a year to measure the quality of hire of the employees they hired a year ago?  Almost none!

The other issue here is why is Quality of Hire a recruiting measure, to begin with? Are the recruiters ultimately choosing who gets hired and who doesn’t?  No? That’s what I thought.

So, the recruiter can give the best candidate in the world to a hiring manager, but she instead hires a gal from her sorority who bombs out, and the recruiter gets killed on the quality of hire metric? That sounds fair.

Quality of hire metrics only became something because TA Leaders didn’t have the guts to tell the executives in their organizations that this isn’t really something that matters to the effectiveness of the TA function.  Quality of hire is a hiring manager metric.  You know how it’s measured? By looking at their operational measures and seeing if they actually met them.  If they didn’t it one of three things: they don’t know how to hire, or they don’t know how to manage, or both.

Regardless, check out the LinkedIn report. It has some good data points that are fun to discuss!

The Definitive Recipe for Success 

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Early this week I was in the car listening to NPR on my way to a meeting. I can’t even remember which show and who was being interviewed but I remember what was said by the person being interviewed. The topic was about success.

The person being interviewed said that you reach success by having four components, which are:

– Talent

– Persistence

– Patience

– Luck

You don’t have to have all four at the same time to be successful, but you’ll probably have all four in some kind of combination if you are successful.

At first, I thought, well, yeah, duh, if you’re talented, if you’re the most talented, you’ll be successful. But that isn’t true. I can give you a hundred examples of the most talented people in any profession who are failures because they didn’t use their talents. They wasted what they had.

I love persistent people. The hustle. The grind. The never give up attitude. The scrapers in life. These are my people. I won’t take no for answer. I’ll keep doing it and doing it and doing it until I break through. So, of course, persistence is a key ingredient to success.

Patience is where I struggle. You see persistence and patience aren’t usually friends. They don’t like hanging out with each other. But, when I look at the most successful people in my life that I hang out, they all have great patience. Having patience doesn’t mean you’re willing to sit around and wait to be successful, but it’s knowing that sometimes the best path to success if putting in your time to get there. Ugh! I wish I knew this when I was 25!

Luck. Oh, boy, here we go. Successful people never want to admit luck is involved. I’m a self-made person. I did it on my own. I’m not lucky! Luck is a bad word to successful people, but it discounts the hard work, the effort and the time you put into becoming successful. But, again, each successful person I know can point to a time, or a person, or a meeting, or some chance circumstance that can only be categorized as luck. You can do every single thing right in your life, and not be successful, without that one lucky break.

I like the model.

It doesn’t let you off the hook. You still have to do it all. You can’t just say, ‘well, I didn’t get it because I wasn’t lucky enough”. That’s false, be patient. I didn’t get it because I wasn’t talented enough. No, keep at it. Luck finds those more rapidly who are talented, persistent, and patient.

I lucky enough to have a pretty good career. It only took me twenty-five years of grinding to find that luck…

Unchained! Attracting Talent That Isn’t Chained to a Desktop!

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From manufacturing to construction to retail to restaurants to the service industries, most of our talent doesn’t actually sit ‘chained’ to a desk, but we’re still using recruiting practices that start with the notion we all sit at a desk waiting for a recruiter to find us!

It’s amazing that over the past couple decade most talent acquisition departments have recruited in basically in the exact same way for both office-type workers and those workers who never sit behind a desk. Which is to assume every person, regardless of where they actually work, apply and look for jobs in the same manner. They don’t!

Sign up for the Unchained! Attracting Mobile Talent Webinar with Tim Sackett and Samantha Herbein for a free discussion on how to recruit great talent out in the field, out on the plant floor, or out servicing your customers. This webinar will take place on Tuesday, December 12th at 1 pm EST! 

On this webinar you will learn:

  • The tactics top recruiting organizations use to find great talent out in the field
  • How to craft engaging text messages with introductions, call-to-actions, and signatures
  • Best practices for making introductions, asking questions, screening candidates, and scheduling interviews
  • As well as old school and new school talent attraction techniques that work, that you can start using right away!

This is a free webinar focusing on how you and your organization can begin to use innovative, modern recruiting practices to find that talent you need most!

 

5 Things Leaders Need to Know About Developing Employees

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I think we try and deliver a message to organizations that all employees need and want to be developed.  This is a lie.  Many of our employees do want and need development. Some don’t need it, they’re better than you.  Some don’t want it, just give me my check.  Too many of our leaders truly believe they can develop and make their employees better than they already are.  This is a lot tougher than it sounds, and something most leaders actually fail at moving the needle on.

Here are some things I like to share with my leaders in developing their employees:

1. “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time” -Maya Angelou.  I see too many leaders trying to change adult employees.  Adult behaviors are basically locked. If they show you they don’t want to work.  They don’t want to work.  Part of developing a strong relationship is spending time with people who are not a waste of time.

2. People only change behavior they want to change, and even then, sometimes they’re not capable of it.  See above.  When I was young in my career, I was very ‘passionate’. That’s what I liked calling it – passionate.  I think the leaders I worked with called it, “career derailer”.  It took a lot for me to understand what I thought was a strength, was really a major weakness.  Some people never will gain this insight.  They’ll continue to believe they’re just passionate when in reality they’re just really an asshole.

3. Don’t invest more in a person than they are willing to invest in themselves.  I want you to be great. I want you to be the best employee we have ever had work here.  You need to be a part of that.  I’m willing to invest an immense amount of time and resources to help you reach your goals, but you have to meet me halfway, at least. Don’t think this means a class costs $2,000, so you should be willing to pay half. It doesn’t. Financial investment is easier for organizations to put in than for employees, but if you pay for the class and it’s on a Saturday and the employee turns their nose up to it, they’re not willing to ‘invest’ their share.

4. It’s usually never the situation that’s pissing you off, it’s the mindset behind the situation that’s pissing you off.  Rarely do I get upset over a certain situation. Frequently, I get upset over how someone has decided to handle that situation.  Getting your employees to understand your level of importance in a situation is key to getting you both on the same page towards a solution. Failure to do this goes down a really disastrous path.

5, Endeavor to look at disappointment with broader strokes. It’s all going to work out in the end.  It’s hard for leaders to act disappointed.  We are supposed to be strong and not show our disappointment.  This often makes our employees feel like we aren’t human.  The best leaders I’ve ever had showed disappoint, but with this great level of resolve that I admired. This sucks. We are all going to make it through this and be better. Disappointment might be the strongest developmental opportunity you’ll ever get as a leader, with your people.

The Talent Acquisition Trends You Need to Focus on for 2018!

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Hey gang!

My buddy, Kris Dunn, and I will be leading a free webinar tomorrow talking about the talent acquisition trends you should be focusing on in 2018 that will have the fastest and most lasting impact to your talent strategy success.

Artificial intelligence, Google for Jobs and other hot topics are dominating conversations across the recruitment industry. But at the end of the day, do they really impact your business?

With new recruitment trends popping up all the time, you need to know which ones are worth getting behind — and which fleeting ones you can afford to ignore. Most importantly, you need to be able to cut through the noise and align your business around strategies that will position you firmly ahead of your competition in 2018 and beyond.

Talent acquisition experts Tim Sackett and Kris Dunn will join CareerBuilder’s Scott Helmes to address these issues and more in a new CareerBuilder webinar, “AI, Google for Jobs & More: Talent Acquisition Trends You Need to Focus on in 2018 (And Buzzwords to Ignore)” at 1 p.m. EST on Tuesday, Dec. 5th. (That’s tomorrow!) 

You will walk away with:

  • Tips on how to position your business to have the best staffing and recruiting year ever in 2018
  • Insights on key talent acquisition and staffing trends — and how they will impact your business
  • Strategies to be more efficient and productive so you can show 2018 who’s boss

Register Now

Come join the conversation and start off 2018 on a great path of recruiting success! 

Your Male Employees Are Running Scared!

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Ugh, I don’t even know if I want to write about this, but I just got back from the Recruiting Trends and Talent Tech Conference, and this one subject dominated most of my conversations in one way or another.

First, don’t think I’m looking for compassion for men. As a gender, we’ve dug our own hole pretty deep over the years. Let’s face it, many of us men can be super creepy at times, and unless you’re totally disconnected, we’ve been seeing this play out very publicly recently.

One thing is very certain in my eyes, dudes are paying attention to what is happening around sexual harassment, and probably for the first time in our history!

That’s a good thing. The stories I’m hearing from female friends and peers about dudes that I know is sickening. And, I’m the dude who goes to every conference and pulls some unsuspecting lady on stage and hugs her publicly! Thankfully, I wrote the workplace hugging rules, so it’s only semi-creepy when I do this!

Like everything that happens in our society it usually comes with both good and bad outcomes. An outcome of being more aware of how males act towards females is hopefully more appropriate, professional behavior in all interactions between the sexes. It won’t stop. Let’s face it, some dudes are born super creepy, and they’ll continue to be super creepy.

A negative outcome of this awareness is good dudes being scared to act normally because of what might be perceived as some pervy behavior. I’ll give you an example. I was at dinner with a large group at the Recruiting Trends conference this past week and we were all staying in different hotels.

One of the females in our group was at a hotel by herself, it was dark, and in ‘normal’ times, 100% of the time I would have walked her back to her hotel on a dark night, in the city. 100%. I didn’t.

I was scared of the perception this woman would have of me, thinking I was trying to come on to her. I was scared what other females in the group might think of me being so ‘presumptive’ that this female needed me to ‘help’ her get safely back to her hotel.

I apologized to this lady the next day. As a man, raised by women, I was embarrassed that I let what is happening in the media change my views of who I am. I should have done the ‘right’ thing and walked her to her hotel so she wasn’t alone.

The next day I spoke to both men and women about this, together, and the group understood, but also said, “hey, Tim, but you’re not creepy’. Great, but how do I know? How do others know? How does one woman define creepy from another?

All of this bad behavior by men coming out publicly is good for the world, but don’t think it doesn’t come with major cultural change as well.  Chivalry can be viewed as wanted and unwanted, and if there is a 1% chance I think it might be unwanted, I’m out! I can not take that professional risk!

Men are running scared in your workforce right now. Much of that fear, for some, is very warranted. They should be scared based on how they’ve been awful. Some of it is an unintended consequence of making society better as a whole.

I guess if you want me to walk you back to your hotel in 2018 I would appreciate you asking me instead of me offering, so I know for sure I’m not being creepy!

Hit me in the comments. What other things are males doing that we probably view as ‘helpful’ that ladies are viewing as ‘creepy’?