Category Archives: Learning

10 Solutions to Your Worst HR and TA Headaches!

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CareerBuilder did a funny thing at their booth at the HR Tech Conference this year and had people vote on their worst HR and TA headaches. CB then had a running total scoreboard on which headaches were the worst.  Kris Dunn and I loved the idea and we are putting on a webinar next Tuesday, sponsored by our friends at CareerBuilder, called, “Why Can’t All My Recruiting Tools Get Along?!” – which is one of our biggest TA headaches!

In this webinar, you’ll get our Top 10 HR and TA Headaches, but also the solutions to those headaches!  Basically, KD and I will give you are secret headache solutions!  Here are some the headaches we’ll be discussing:

  • “My hiring managers won’t give me feedback on candidates!” 
  • “I can’t get 100% of my employees to complete our mandatory training!?”
  • “We just had another candidate no call – no show! Our we allowed to shoot them?!” 
  • “Hey, Recruiter Tim, I ‘really’ like the candidate you sent me, but can I see just a few more?!” 
  • “I know I told you I would accept $75K for the job, but I really meant to say $90K!” 
  • And many, many more!

Do you need an aspirin? I do.

But, don’t fret, Kris and I will give you our guaranteed migraine knockout solutions, and none of which include you having to hire a hitman to ‘take care’ of business for you!  This webinar will be fun and lively, but like everything we do, also give you some real practical ideas and advice on helping you solve your worst HR and TA headaches!

WHEN:  Tuesday, November 3rd

TIME:  1 pm EST

WHERE: CLICK HERE! 

Who Will Your Pallbearers Be?

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I had lunch last week with a good friend of mine.  We’ve been trying for six months to get this lunch set up, but just haven’t been able to make it happen.

This is a guy I love!  We worked together at Applebee’s, spent basically every day together. He’s the best operations person I know, great leader, and one of the few people I would ever go to work for.

So, why haven’t we been able to find time to get together more often?

Well, he told me, “Tim, you know I think you’re great. You are the best HR person I’ve ever worked with. But, I’ve been trying to focus on who my Pallbearers will be!”

What!?!

He’s been trying to focus on six relationships. The six people who will carry his casket when he dies. His Pallbearers!

His theory is I can’t keep up with everyone. I’ve probably got six relationships that I can really focus on in my life. These six people I call my Pallbearers. They are the ones who will carry me to my final resting place, and given that, I better focus on having a really good relationship with them.

So, two things:

  1. I didn’t make his Pallbearer list. Which I’m actually okay with. I loved hearing the philosophy to behind why he’s dodged me for six straight months, and how he selected his six!
  2. I don’t have six!

It really got me to thinking.  Who the hell would my Pallbearers be?  If you take out family, because I really don’t want them to work to hard the day I go six feet under, who would carry my casket? Sadly, I couldn’t come up with six.

I’m 45 years old, and I couldn’t think of six people who would carry my casket. Not if they were asked. I’ve been asked to be a pallbearer, and you can’t say No, even if you really don’t know the person. I mean six people who wouldn’t allow anyone else to carry my casket because they wanted the honor!

In my mind, I’m thinking six men.  I have some close friends that are ladies, but I’m a little traditional in that you don’t normally see ladies carrying a casket. I’ve either got a bunch of relationship building to do, or I need to lose a bunch of weight! If I’m super skinny, maybe I can get away with just four pallbearers!

Another thought was cremation. If I get cremated I really only need one person to carry the ashes.  That would be way easier to find just one!

I still kept coming back to the pallbearer six.  Why don’t I have six male relationships in my life who would really want to carry my casket?  Need to change that.

In the end, it comes down to priorities.  For the better part of 19 years I’ve put my time into my family and raising kids. And, I don’t regret a moment of that! But, my friendships suffered because of it. Pallbearer type friendships take time and effort. Time and effort I didn’t give.

Do you know who your pallbearers will be?

 

5 Tips for Creating a More Human Workplace #WorkHuman

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Better Than Robots: Why Your Employees Deserve a More Human Workplace

This is a Free Webinar sponsored by Globoforce – Register Here – Wednesday, October 14th at 2 p.m. ET | 11 a.m. PT | 1 p.m. CT | 6 p.m. GMT

This is going to be fun! We won’t be coming to live from my Camry, but we will be Live! Just two HR guys sharing the tips and tricks on making your workplace and environment more human!

Admit it. Life would be a lot easier if our employees were robots. They’d be more predictable, and a heck of a lot more manageable. As we seek to gain more and more big data in HCM it seems like that’s exactly what we’re trying to do. Measure and manage our cultures into a robot paradise. But that way lies danger. It is the humanity in our employees that provides the creativity, the innovation and the heart that makes our businesses really succeed.

We’re in the ‘real’ people business, and our employees need a real human workplace and culture to thrive and prosper. This webinar will give you the insight to what works and what doesn’t, and help you reimagine the concept of work-life balance.

You will learn:

  • 5 tips for creating a more human workplacGloboforce
  • A case study of how one company built a better culture
  • HR “best practices” that actually hurt workplace culture

 

What else will you get? 

Kris Dunn is coming on to talk about how he and his team are building a more human workplace at his company Kinetix.  Get some great insight and tips from Kris on how you can begin building this in your own workplace as well! The Kinetix team has one of the best cultures around, and you’ll want to hear how they’ve built from the ground up.

This isn’t your normal webinar. This is real advice, brought to you by real practitioners, letting you know what works and what doesn’t!

Register Today! 

 

The Most Powerful Employee Motivator of All

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I was once fired from a job.  I won’t go into the story because we all have a story and we all frame it to sound like a victim. In hindsight, many years removed, I would have fired me to!

After being fired I could only think about one thing. It consumed me. I wanted to show whomever I went to work for how great I really was.  I didn’t want the ‘fired’ label to follow me, even for a minute.  I wasn’t ‘that’ person. I was better. I wanted…

Redemption!

Redemption is the most powerful employee motivator of all time. None others are even close.

It’s why always laugh when a hiring manager tells me they will never hire someone who has been fired from a job. Really!?  I actually only want people who have been fired from jobs! I want people who have failed, and have a giant chip on their shoulder to show the world they are better than that.

I don’t want to hire crappy people who were fired because they actually have no skill and no personality.  That’s the problem, right? We believe everyone who has been fired to be crappy. “Well, Tim, people don’t get fired if they’re good!” Really? You believe that?

Good people get fired every day. They get fired for making bad decisions. They get fired for pissing off the wrong person. They get fired because they didn’t fit your culture. They get fired because of bad job fit. Good people get fired, maybe as much as bad people get fired. Unfortunately, we lump all of them into the same pool.

Redemption sets the good fires apart from the bad fires.

You can hear redemption speak when interviewing a good fire.  Bad fires don’t speak of redemption, they speak of justification.  Good fires want a second chance to show the world they are right. Bad fires want a second chance to show the world they were wronged. Those are two very different things!

I like redemption motivation.  It sticks around for a long while. Those scars don’t go away easily.

How to Gently Crush Your Employee’s Dreams!

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I get the feeling that many of your employees feel that HR Pros are Dream Crushers!  It’s the main reason almost everyone hates HR, right?

I don’t actually buy into this theory, but there are some valid things we do in HR that don’t help our reputation.  Here’s how we crush dreams on a daily basis:

  1. We don’t allow our employees to develop.  Let’s first start with the concept of development vs. training.  You giving job training is not development. While it might help the employee get better at the job they have, it’s not exactly personal or professional development. Development is very individualized.
  2. We don’t listen or act on your employees ideas.  I get to go in and work with companies a lot and almost always the employees already know what needs to be done, but leadership isn’t listening to them.  So, I’m not really brought in to tell them something they don’t know, I’m brought in to them their employees are smart and you should start listening to them!
  3. We don’t allow our employees to dream about the future. This is really difficult for most organizations.  We won’t promise an employee where they’ll be in 1 or 2 or 3 years, because we believe if we can’t deliver it, it worse than not giving them anything to begin with.  Actually, that’s a false premise.  Allowing your employees to dream about the future and giving them something to shoot for, will give them hope. Hopeful employees stay around and work hard.
  4. We micromanage the work, not the result.  I don’t care how you get there, just get me there.  We have been taught for way too long to ‘manage’ people. This means we tell them how to do the job exactly, instead of letting do the job in a way that works best for them, and holding them accountable to the result, not the path. This not only crushes your employees dreams, it crushes their soul.

I think it would be funny to see someone has that as a title in HR: Dream Crusher, VP of Crushing Dreams, Chief Dream Crusher!  Sad, but funny.

What are you doing with your employees today?

Watch Me LIVE Right Now! #CBEmpower15

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That’s right, someone made the brilliant decision to put me on TV LIVE. Lights, camera, action!  Today, I’ll be bringing you all the cool stuff happening at Empower 15 in Chicago!

The Live Stream will start at 8am CST today and go all day until 5pm CST (that’s 9am for you East Coasters – and way too early for those on the left coast!).

My friend Laurie Ruettimann will be joining me to kick it off in this morning, then I’ll be bringing you many other great HR and Talent Pros/Celebs throughout the day.

If you want to ask a question on the Live Stream – hit me on the Twitters at #CBEmpower15 or @TimSackett and I’ll try to make you famous!

Click below to get to Live Stream feed:

Empower 15 Live Stream

Remember! This is LIVE, who knows what might happen…

 

CareerBuilder Empower 15 Live Stream Wednesday Sept. 10th!

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Next week Wednesday, September 10th, CareerBuilder has asked me to Host their Live Stream of Empower 15!

That’s right, someone made the brilliant decision to put me on LIVE. Lights, camera, action!  To bring to you all the cool stuff happening at Empower!

The Live Stream will start at 8am CST and go all day until 5pm CST (that’s 9am for you East Coasters – and way too early for those on the left coast!).  My friend Laurie Ruettimann will be joining me to kick it off in the morning, then I’ll be bringing you many other great HR and Talent Pros/Celebs throughout the day. Click on the link above for Wednesday’s lineup of great presenters!

Click below to get to Live Stream feed:

Empower 15 Live Stream

What is Empower?

DISCOVER. ELEVATE. INSPIRE.

The act of connecting employers and job seekers to make meaningful matches has changed dramatically over the past 20 years. And new economic, digital, and social trends have introduced an entirely new set of challenges. We’re giving you a front row seat to share the journey as we look back and, more importantly, ahead to the next 20. Join CareerBuilder and 1000+ other leaders for the talent acquisition event of the year where we’ll identify opportunities to continue to move the industry forward and work together to make recruitment easier and more effective.

Empower is Talent Acquisition’s version of all those cool HR conferences your HR peers get to go to, but they aren’t really designed for true Talent Acquisition leaders!

Are you Great at Faking it?

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In our zest to have high employee engagement, HR has once again outsmarted itself.  Follow the logic:

1. High Employee Engagement is a desired measure.

2. HR creates programs to drive Employee Engagement upwards.

3. Employee Engagement thresholds are reached with said programs.

4. HR needs more.

5. If we ensure every new hire comes in ‘loving’ their job/company/industry – we will ‘pre-buy’ some of the engagement measure.

6. Only hire people who ‘love’ our job/company/industry.

7. Candidates have brains.  “Oh, you only hire people who ‘love’ your job/company/industry”

8. Candidates now become really good at ‘faking’ their ‘love’ for your job/company/industry.

9.  Employees are smart to – “Oh, you mean if our ‘engagement’ score comes back higher, you’ll stop making us do these stupid team building exercises?”

10. Employees become really good at ‘faking’ it.

Being male, I was never good at faking it.  I’m Popeye – “I am, what I am, and that’s all I am”.   Fast Company had a solid post on why “Faking Enthusiasm” has become the latest job requirement. From the post:

“Timothy Noah wrote in The New Republic about how Pret A Manger requires its employees to master “Pret behaviors,” such as “has presence,” “creates a sense of fun,” and “is happy to be themself.” Yes–in order to sell you a bacon sandwich, employees must be fully self-actualized. And the amount that they touch fellow-employees is considered to be a positive indicator of sales, not a red flag for sexual-harassment lawsuits.”

It’s such a slippery slope.  Every action we take in leadership has consequences – some of which we know, some we don’t know until they happen.  The best leaders thoroughly try to anticipate these consequences their actions will create.   Requiring employees/candidates have high levels of enthusiasm might seem like a really great idea – but you better have authentic ways of measuring, or you’re just setting yourself up to fooled by those who ‘get’ the game.

Ultimately time and pressure always win out.  Given enough time and/or enough pressure an individuals true colors will show.  This is why it’s important to job requirements that are actually needed.  Authentic enthusiasm is not needed for high performers in most jobs.  Trying to hire for it can create some negative hiring scenarios when time and pressure take their tolls.  Is it great to have enthusiastic employees? Yep – it sure is.  I love being around those employees.  Do I set out to hire that ‘skill’ as a requirement – no – I have great even keel employees as well.  While I might not stop and interact with them as often – they are just as good as the enthusiastic ones.

Here’s what I know. If you’re hiring for a skill that can be faked – candidates will attempt to fake it, if they really want to work for your company.  How do you combat this – eliminate as much subjective stuff as you can from your selection process.  One other thing, if you do decide you need that high-energy personality, understand that personality just doesn’t come when you want it – it’s a person’s core – you get it all the time – there’s no light switch when you decide you’ve had enough.  I see hiring managers all the time that want a ‘certain personality’ – so we find it for them – only to have that same hiring manager come back 6 months later complaining it’s too much!

The 19 Types of HR & Talent Software You Need

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I’m a virgin when it comes to HR Technology.  When I first got into really studying the industry I probably put HR technology into about three buckets: HR system of record, applicant tracking systems and payroll.  If you had those three types of software you had what you basically needed to run HR.

My friends, William and John, over at Key Interval Research recently released their latest study called “The Optimal Technical Stack”. The goal being let’s figure out what pieces of HR and Talent Technology you really need to run a ‘complete’ HR shop, and ideal HR shop.  If money was no object, what technology solutions should you have to be great?

Here’s the list. I’m going to put in order to what I think you should invest in first to last. The guys at Key Interval did not do this. They do real research, this ranking is just my opinion:

1. Human Resource Information System (HRIS)

2. Payroll

3. Recruiting/Talent Acquisition (Applicant Tracking Systems & Recruiting Automation)

4. Benefits Management

5. OnBoarding

6. Total Rewards (Recognition)

7. Performance Management

8.  Time & Attendance/Scheduling (Key broke T&A and Scheduling out separately, I think they go together)

9. Learning Management

10. HR Analytics

11. Succession Management

12. Engagement Tools

13. Recruiting Tools (Interviewing tools and Assessments – Key broke these out as two separate categories)

14. Wellness Management

15. Compensation Management

16. Employment Websites (CareerBuilder, LinkedIn, Glassdoor, etc.)

17. Collaboration/Communication Tools (Tools that help your employees communicate with each other: Yammer, TINYPulse, Chatter, etc.)

18. Case Management (Employee hotlines, tracking calls and issues brought into HR, etc.)

19. Workforce Planning & Workforce Management (Key had these broken out, but I think they actually probably fall into one of the 18 categories I have listed above somewhere)

You might rank this list differently depending on the situation you find yourself in with your current organization.  If I had my HR shop locked in and running down the tracks smoothly, maybe I would move up Wellness. If I had a crunch on hiring, maybe I move up some of the recruiting, interviewing talent attraction types of technology.

I think most people would look at this list and believe that their HR ‘suite’ is providing them with most, if not all of this stuff.  The reality is, most suites are good with about three of these, touch another three, and try to make you believe they have another three. That makes nine pieces they might cover, which leaves a ton of technology you just don’t have.

If you were to listen to any HR or Talent technology vendor in 2015, you would be led to believe that the only piece of technology you really need is HR Analytics!  That’s all we hear in the marketplace right now.

Another fascinating piece from the Key Interval research was that Succession Technology is ranked as the most desired need of organizations. Yet, has one of the lowest market penetrations. Also, it was clear to me, that organizations don’t really see any leader in this space. Most respondents used one of three tools for Succession: Some in-house/home grown (like an Excel spreadsheet), relied on what their HRIS suite offered (which is probably very weak) or relied on what their Learning Management system offered (probably weaker yet!).

No real players in Succession Technology!  Sounds like an opportunity…

Fascinating research and data from Key Interval.  Check them out. I love receiving their reports!

 

T3 – @Learnkit

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This week on T3 I’m reviewing elearning company Learnkit.  Learnkit is a custom elearning agency that, through our unique Learn-cycle pedagogy, produces engaging and enjoyable learning experiences to help organizations and individuals get better, everyday.

What does that mean?  They take your old and tired corporate learning materials and make them innovative, cool and fresh.  Learnkit is an extension of your Learning and Organization Development team.

They offer similar benefits reaped by an internal marketing department that outsources their creative work to a high-end agency.  Bringing this same level of expertise and experience in-house can be very expensive, and often internal teams don’t have the resources to develop elearning at the pace their organization needs. A company like Learnkit has the ability and specialized digital learning experts to rapidly produce tailor-made learning solutions that will match your brand and take advantage of the most cutting edge learning experiences on the market.

5 Things I really like about Learnkit: 

1. Measurable data. Learnkit builds on an elearning platform that provides you with great data, real-time. LOD teams are being pushed to innovate and prove ROI. You only do this by having the data available.

2. Standardize experiences. Learnkit provides a standardized experience across all those you are developing in your organization.

3. On demand access. Our organizations, leaders and employees expect training and development differently today, than ten years ago.  We can no longer wait until the training course is offered again, next month.  On demand elearning systems are a must for large organizations today.

4. Learnkit was impressive in their understanding that in every learning situation in an organization, it’s not just about delivering content, it’s also about having an opportunity to engage and aspire your workforce to be better. Better as individuals, but also better as a whole. This is unique.

5. Learnkit doesn’t offer a cookie cutter, one-size fits all approach.  You see this a lot in elearning solutions. We built something, we throw your content into it, it will work. Maybe, maybe not. I saw multiple client elearning sites that Learnkit put together and none were the same, and all fit the culture and brand of the client they were working with.

Here’s what I know.  In every organization I worked for on the corporate HR side, we had great LOD folks.  The problem was they never had the resources, time and creativity to produce great training and development materials. They were good, but they weren’t great.  We are beginning a time in HR where organizations are going to have to put money into training and development.  For my money, I’m shopping out the design and digital work to experts, and letting my internal team build the content.

 

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.