Category Archives: Life Lessons

A very special episode of T3 – Why Microsoft Overpaid for LinkedIn

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This week on Saved by the Bell…

Remember those ‘very special’ episodes of your favorite TV shows growing up?  When they took a break from their normal sitcom canned laughs to talk about something serious, like smoking in the bathroom, kissing at the school dance, or cheating on a test!

This week on T3 I’ll give you my take on the biggest news to come out of HR/Talent Technology in a long time! Microsoft’s purchase of LinkedIn sent shock waves across the industry this week. LinkedIn is HR Tech’s favorite punching bag because quite frankly their one of the few super success stories in HR Tech.

Microsoft paid $196 dollar per share for LinkedIn, a massive 50% premium as compared to LinkedIn’s closing price on Friday of $131. That’s the biggest question, why so much?

There is a ton of speculation and we’ll all have fun over the next months and years guessing what Microsoft will do with LinkedIn.  History hasn’t been kind to these types of large takeovers. At the beginning, Microsoft has said they’ll let LinkedIn continue to run LinkedIn. We all know that won’t last forever and sometime next year expect to see massive reorganization and layoffs at LinkedIn! That’s just business. When you pay $26.2 Billion for a company, you expect some returns and quickly!

Here’s what we actually know, LinkedIn is in a very unique position in the market, unlike anyone else! Even though 2/3’s of their entire revenue comes from job board type activities (they call them talent solutions), employers still haven’t lost their minds when their employees decide to go on LinkedIn. “It’s only for professional networking!” Yeah, that played well, like five years ago, but now the cat is out of the bag. LinkedIn is full job board 2.0!

I’m not hating! They’re in a brilliant position and one that Microsoft finally found a way to leverage with Office 365. Can you imagine the synergies between the two products? If Office 365 automatically puts the user into a version of LinkedIn, entire organizations will become part of this giant network.  If every Office 365 user gets some free premium access to LinkedIn the number of monthly users will skyrocket. We could just go on and on with possible things they could do, all of which will make talent acquisition departments more dependent on using LinkedIn.

Quite frankly I’m surprised it took this long for a major player in the tech space to understand LinkedIn’s unique position within the market. No organization wants their employees on Monster, CareerBuilder, Dice or Indeed. None of them care if their employees are on LinkedIn?!? It boggles the mind that HR and Talent executives don’t get this!

On top of this 60% of LinkedIn’s traffic is coming through mobile, another big win for Microsoft when purchasing what is becoming a full blown social network in LinkedIn. It will be interesting to see how Facebook and Google react. I’ve said all along Facebook could end LinkedIn instantly if it decided to jump into this space. Microsoft might have just kicked a sleeping bear. Facebook has more users, more frequency, and more data. All of which could lead it to open up it’s own ‘professional network’.

Microsoft overpaid for LinkedIn because they have a plan on leveraging LinkedIn’s unique position.  Will it work? I don’t know, but it’s going to be fun watching!

HR Isn’t Rocket Science!

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I hear one thing over and over from people who read my stuff or see my presentations:

“It’s not rocket science.”

I take that as a compliment.  I’m not trying to ‘wow’ anyone with my big brain.  I’ve never been known for being the big brain type.  I’m the common sense, straight forward type.  HR and Recruiting, to me, shouldn’t be hard and complex.  It should be simple and easy to understand.

That’s the problem.

Too many HR and Talent Pros want to make it seem like ‘our’ jobs are very complex and difficult.  This is very natural, every profession does this.  If HR is easy, you won’t be valued highly by leadership.  So, let’s make it hard.  The last thing anyone wants to do is come out and say, “Hey! A monkey to do my job, but keep paying $80K!”   It’s very difficult culturally to come clean and say, “You know what?  This stuff isn’t hard.  It’s work.  We have a lot to do.  But, if we do what we know we have to do, we’ll solve this!”

But that’s HR and Talent Acquisition. It’s work.  Many times it’s a lot of work!  But we aren’t trying to solve the human genome!  We are trying to administer some processes, get our employees better, find ways to keep them engaged and happy, and find more folks who want to become a part of what we are doing.  Not overly hard.  It’s not rocket science.

I think the complexity in HR and Recruiting comes into play with ‘us’ not being aligned with what our leadership truly wants.  Many times we flat out guess what we think they want out of HR. Sometimes we assume what they want, and try and do that. Very rarely do we actually find out exactly what they expect, and just deliver that.

There are a number of reasons for this.  First, we might not agree with what our leadership wants or expects from HR.  So, we give them what we want and expect from HR.  This never works well, but is tried often!  Second, our leadership changes what the want and expect, as they see better ways to HR and Recruiting.  Change is a bitch.  It’s more of a bitch when it’s happening to you.  Third, we might not have the experience to deliver what is wanted or needed.  So, you get what we can give you.

This seems to be why delivering great HR and Talent Acquisition becomes rocket science.  Simply, we can’t have basic communication with our leadership and some self-insight on our capabilities of what we can actually deliver.   Couple this with most people’s unwillingness to ask for help, because they fear others will look down on them for not knowing, and you’ve hit the HR rocket science grand slam!

HR isn’t hard. Recruiting isn’t hard.  Dealing with expectations, and our own insecurities, that’s hard!

The One Way to be Successful at Recruiting

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Eight years or so ago I started seriously writing for the first time in my life. The only other times I ever wrote in my life were school papers, a journal that my high school English teacher, Ms. Kemp, made me write in each day and love letters to my wife before we were married and email was not yet widely used and phone calls cost too much!

My good friend Kris Dunn got me to write for Fistful of Talent. He and Jessica Lee, who was the editor at the time, gave me the Friday slot at FOT. It was my job to write something snarky and fun, a piece people would read on a Friday, chuckle and know the week is almost over. That gig turned into this gig, which turned into me writing every single day, now going on five-plus years.

In all of this writing, I discovered what a lot of people discover in becoming successful. If you want to be successful at anything, you need to do it! You need to do it a lot! You need to do it every day.

I still write stuff that is crap. I make errors all the time. But, my writing has improved. Once in a while, I actually write something I think is pretty good!

That’s the secret to becoming really good at recruiting. You need to do it all the time!  I see HR Pros who try and recruit every once in a while. They suck at it and they’ll never be good at it because they don’t do it all the time. You can’t pick up a pencil and be instantly good at writing. You can’t pick up a phone and be instantly good at recruiting.

To be good at recruiting you must recruit every day.  You must always be on.  Everyone you meet. Everyone you talk to. Everyone becomes a potential part of your recruiting pipeline. Maybe as a candidate, or a lead, or a referral, etc. You don’t recruit, then turn it off and not recruit. You recruit always.

I’m, now, constantly writing. I rarely go a day when I don’t email myself ideas about something I want to write about. I think like a writer. How can I take this situation and write about it? My friends, family, and coworkers tease me about it (‘Don’t write about this!’ ‘You’re going to write about this aren’t you?’).  I’m always on.

If you truly want to be successful in anything in life you need to do that thing, always. I see recruiters constantly miss opportunities to recruit. To ask the question that would lead them to their next great hire. To pick up the phone and make one more call before they leave for the day. To take a chance and reach out to someone who they don’t think will be interested, but just maybe they will be interested.

Being good at anything is hard. It’s really hard if you want to be good by not doing it.

 

The Right To Disconnect From Work

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Did you hear that France is trying to pass a law that would allow workers to disconnect from the office without fear of disciplinary action? Here’s some more on the proposed bill:

The “right to disconnect” legislation, which would go into effect in 2018 if passed, would require companies to encourage employees to turn off phones and other devices after they leave work…

The law reflects the sense in France that white-collar workers in the digital age are vulnerable to burnout.

Technologia, a risk analysis firm, found that 3.2 million French workers were emotionally exhausted from work and at risk of developing burnout symptoms like exhaustion and chronic stress.

“It is a real problem,” said Yves Lasfargue, a sociologist who specializes in teleworking. “Twenty years ago, before emails had been invented and we could not reach colleagues, we would have to go and knock on their doors. Traditional courtesy teaches you to abstain from disturbing people. With these new tools, this form of courtesy has totally disappeared. This is why we need to legislate.”

“Traditional courtesy”.

Two things at play here. First, there’s no doubt that our new hyper-connected world is causing people to work in ways we could never have imagined twenty years ago.  Most white collar jobs currently have no ‘unplugged’ off the clock hours any longer. People are connected from the moment they wake until the moment they go to sleep, many even getting up during the night when they hear notifications coming in on their devices.

That’s a problem. That’s an organizational problem because we will see burnout at a faster rate than ever before. I am starting to hear about organizations that are shutting down email servers at 6pm and not turning them back on until 5am, trying to force their employees to shut it down and refresh, even shutting down during the weekends. It’s a drastic step, but one some organizations feel is the right one.

Secondly, is this concept of traditional courtesy.  This 1950’s idea of not disturbing someone who is at home for the evening. Most everyone in the workplace has no understanding of this concept.  We don’t come home at 5pm to a wife and kids sitting down for a hot meal the ‘Mrs’ cooked all afternoon. Our society has completely changed from this “Leave It To Beaver” idea of how our lives should look.

Still, I hear this courtesy issue come up many times when speaking with corporate talent acquisition pros. Well, we don’t want to make calls to people after 6pm because ‘they’ don’t like it.  I still call bullshit on this! People don’t like getting calls after 9pm, otherwise, we’ve been conditioned by telemarketers to expect calls up until 9pm.

People don’t like being bothered at home with stuff that doesn’t have value to them! If you call them about a great opportunity, they would rather take that call from home, than from work. This has nothing to do with courtesy.  If someone has decided to ‘unplug’ for the evening, they simply won’t pick up your call. You believing this is a courtesy issue, is an excuse not to be an effective recruiter!

So, what say you? Should there be laws on the books encouraging people to shut it down at night?  I think our new world has given us more flexibility to work in our own way. I personally like that I can work when I need to. Do I need to ‘unplug’ more, especially around my family? There is no doubt. But don’t take my flexibility away from me!

Your Sunsets Are Numbered!

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I had a couple of things happen to me this past week. First, I traveled to the Cayman Islands for an HR conference and some vacation.

I’m in love with the Cayman Islands. Great people, the most beautiful water you’ll ever see and mind changing sunsets.  I swam with Stingrays and Sea Turtles. I saved my wife’s life from dragged out to sea. I broke bread, several times, with friends, old and new. I was a pretty damn good trip!

I did Disrupt HR Cayman (My presentation starts at 18:18 on the video link) and talked about how Failure is the New Black, but shouldn’t be. Believing failure is okay is the worst snake oil being sold by leadership gurus today. Don’t believe the hype!

The sunset thing got me thinking. The other thing that happened is I had a friend unexpectedly pass away this past week as well.

So, I’m watching these great sunsets and thinking about my friend and understanding a little about you can’t take all of these sunsets for granted. But we do.

We take for granted that we will definitely see another sunset.  So, what does this all mean?

I could tell you the same crap you hear from everyone that talks about this: make sure you tell people you love them, do what you wish now, etc., etc., etc. But I won’t, because you won’t listen. Instead, do this:

  1. Drink expensive alcohol. You’ll drink less of it, and enjoy it more.
  2. Wear really good shoes. They’ll feel better, look better and last longer.
  3. Eat food that you like. I’m not a foodie. Sometimes people eat crap trying to impress others, but it quite honestly tastes awful. You’re not impressing anyone. Shake Shack tastes great. I’m that kind of foodie – burger and fries foodie.
  4. Hang with people who want to hang with you. We spend way too much time in life hanging with assholes.
  5. Go to the other side of the Island. There’s beauty everywhere, and yet we tend to go where we know.  Some of the greatest moments in my life happen when I go to where I know nothing.

How’s that for life-changing advice that you didn’t ask for?

Now get back to work and make some money!

The Tim Sackett Commencement Speech

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It’s that time of year when universities and high schools go through graduation ceremonies and we celebrate educational achievements.  It’s also that time of year when you get bombarded with every great commencement speech ever given.  There is clearly a recipe for giving a great commencement speech.  Here are the ingredients:

1. Make the graduates feel like they are about to accomplish something really great, and not just become part of the machine.

2. Make graduates believe like somehow they will be difference makers.

3. Make graduates think they have endless possibilities and opportunities.

4. Make graduates think the world really wants and need them and can’t wait to work with them.

5. Wear sunscreen.

I think that about sums up every great commencement speech ever given.  Let’s face it, the key to any great speech is not telling people what they need to hear, but telling them what they want to hear!

I would like to give a commencement speech.  I think it would be fun.  I like to inspire people.  Here are the main topics I would hit if I were to give a commencement speech:

1.  Work sucks, but being poor sucks more. Don’t ever think work should make you happy.  Find happiness in yourself, not what you do.

2.  You owe a lot of people, a lot of stuff.  Shut your mouth and give back to them. Stop looking for the world to keep giving you stuff.

3.  No one cares about you. Well, maybe your Mom, if you had a good Mom.  They care about what you can do for them.  Basically, you can’t do much, you’re a new grad.

4.  Don’t think you’re going to be special. 99.9% of people are just normal people, so will you.  The sooner you come to grips with this, the sooner you’ll be happy.

5.  Don’t listen to your bitter parents.  Almost always, the person who works the hardest has better outcomes in anything in life.  Once in a while, a person who doesn’t work hard, but has supremely better talent or connections than you, will kick your ass.  That’s life. Buy a helmet.

6.  Don’t listen to advice from famous people.  Their view of the world is warped through their grandiose belief somehow they made it through hard work and effort. It’s usually just good timing.

7. Find out who you care about in life, and make them a priority.  In this world, you have very few people you truly care about, and who care about you in return.  Don’t fuck that up.

8.  Make your mistakes when you’re young.  Failure is difficult, it’s profoundly more difficult when you have a mortgage and 2 kids to take care of.

9.  It’s alright that sometimes you have to kiss ass.  It doesn’t make you less of a person.

10.  Wear sunscreen.  Cancer sucks.

So, do you feel inspired now!?  Any high schools or colleges feel free to email me, I’m completely wide open on my commencement speech calendar and willing to give this speech in a moments notice!

Failure Is The New Black #DisruptHRCayman

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So, last night in the Cayman Islands DisruptHR Cayman went down!  If you don’t know what DisruptHR is, you need to check it out!  It’s the brainchild of my good friends Jennifer McClure and Chris Ostoich. Jen does most of the heavy lifting on this now, and it’s a global phenomenon sweeping across the HR world!

The concept was born from TEDx. You get 5 minutes to present an awesome idea, 20 powerpoint slides that automatically move every 15 seconds. Fast and furious. Alcohol is involved. Anything can happen. It’s the most fun you’ll ever see HR people have!  Contact Jen and bring this concept to your conference or event – it’s a great evening event to open or close a conference, or just to have in your city to energize the HR community!

Don’t think about grabbing DisruptHR Detroit!  I already have bought the franchise, so to speak! If you want in, connect with me and we can discuss a time and place!

I did my DisruptHR Cayman presentation on Failure is the new Black!  Safe to say, I truly believe all of this talk about failure leading you to success is a bunch of bullshit! Failure leads you to more failure, which eventually leads you to give up, not success! But don’t worry about, I’m in the minority, you can still suck up all that failure crap from every leadership guru on the planet!

Was I successful in my 5 minutes?  I don’t know, but you can check it out for yourself at DisruptHR’s website in a week or two. The brilliance of DisruptHR is that they video all the crazy ideas and put them up on the web, so you can’t hide!

Great stuff, check it out. They already have 250 videos of DisruptHR presentations for you to see!

4 Tips for Hiring Candidates Who Have True Grit!

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In our ever constant struggle to find the secret sauce of finding the best talent, many organizations are looking to hire candidates who have grit. What the heck is grit? Candidates who have grit tend to have better resolve, tenacity, and endurance.

Ultimately, executives are looking for employees who will get after it and get stuff done. Employees who aren’t waiting around to be told what to do, but those who will find out what it is we should be doing and go make it happen. Grit.

It seems so easy until you sit down in front of a candidate and try and figure out if the person actually has grit or not! You take a look at that guy from 127 Hours, the one who cut his own arm off to save his . That’s easy, he has grit! Susy, the gal sitting across from you, who went to a great state school, and worked at a Fortune 500 company for five years, it’s hard to tell if she has grit or not!

I haven’t found a grit test on the market, so we get back to being really good at questioning and interviewing to raise our odds we’ll make the right choices of those with grit over those who tell us they have grit but really don’t!

When questioning candidates about their grit, focus on these four things:

  1. Passion. People with grit are passionate about something. I always feel that if someone has passion it’s way easier to get them to be passionate about my business and my industry. If they don’t have true passion about anything, it’s hard to get them passionate about my organization.
  1. Doer. When they tell you what they’re passionate about, are they backing it up by actually doing something with it? I can’t tell you how many times I’ll ask someone what their passion is and then ask them how they’re pursuing their passion and they’ve done nothing!
  1. What matters to them. Different from passion in that you need to find out what matters to these people in a work setting. Candidates with grit will answer this precisely and quickly. Others will search for an answer and feel you out for what you’re looking for. I want a workplace that allows me to… the rest doesn’t matter, they know, many have no idea.
  1. Hope. To have grit, to be able to keep going when the going gets tough, you must have hope that things will work out. The glass might be half full or half empty, it doesn’t matter, because if I have a glass, I’ll find something to put in it!

I’ve said this often, but I believe individuals can acquire grit by going through bad work situations. We tend to want to hire perfect unscarred candidates from the best brands who haven’t had to show if they have grit or not.

I love those candidates with battle wounds and scars from companies that were falling apart, but didn’t. I know those people had to have grit to make it out alive!  I want those employees by my side when we go to battle.

Check out Angela Duckworth’s book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance for more on this subject!

 

 

The Greatest Retirement Benefits You Can Give Your Employees

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My Dad retired this past year. I’m already ‘leveraging’ him for some time. He has so much of it now! It’s like he won the time lotto and he’s throwing it around because he’s got so much of it. “Hey Dad, can I borrow a couple of hours!? It’s a busy week! I need you to pick up the kids!”

I read this article, The Huge Retirement Benefit You Probably Aren’t Expecting recently:

America is reaching a tipping point. Adults in the busiest phase of life, juggling kids and careers, number about 40 million, which is roughly equal to those near and in retirement, who typically have time on their hands. But the number of adults pressed for time is projected to grow slowly, reaching 49 million by 2050. By contrast, the number of retirees with plenty of free time will explode to 88 million, as more and more boomers retire.

When you add it all up, retirees will have 2.5 trillion hours of leisure time to fill over the next 20 years. This free time will redefine their habits and priorities—even their identities. And yet almost no one is planning for this sweeping change, according to a report from Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Age Wave.

Time is going to be the new currency of future generations. It’s like lake front property, there’s only so much. Unless you live in Dubai and have billions, then I guess you can make new lake front property!

The crazy thing is, organizations aren’t really putting that much effort into figuring this whole thing out. We’re treating it like we’ve treated retirement for decades. “Well, Bill’s retiring, let’s throw him a party, buy him a walker with a horn, and give his work to the new kid.” We aren’t thinking in a new context of what do these ‘new’ folks who are retiring really want?

What I’ve learned from Dad is we in HR are missing some things. Here are some ideas of Retirement Benefits you could offer, but you haven’t even begun to think in this new way of time:

1. Part-time, flexible Mentorships – Some people can’t wait to stop working for your organization. Many feel they’re being ‘nicely’ pushed out, or society makes them feel like ‘it’s time’ to leave. The reality, so many of your retiring employees would love to keep in touch. Help out the new kids. Lead mentor groups on how to deal with customer issues, leadership dilemmas, customer/client feedback, etc. And most would do it for free! They would volunteer their time!

2. Corporate Community Volunteer Programs – Remember, these super valuable, experienced, loyal former employees who love your brand, have a couple trillion (with a T) hours on their hands! Can you imagine how much good will you could leverage in the community if you activated your retirees as volunteers with some direction and leadership!?  It could transform your corporate presence within the markets you serve. BTW – hospitals do a great job at this! There is no reason you shouldn’t be able to do this in your organization as well.

3. C-Suite Bullship Detectors – Your executives don’t always know what’s really going on because they have a bunch of VPs kissing their ass telling them what they think they want to hear. Retirees are a great mechanism to tell your executives what is actually going on, versus what they’re being told. They’re like highly paid consultants, without the highly paid part!  We all need someone without a vested interest to tell us like it is, even when it stings a little. Your retirees would love to do this. Works really well for newer retirees who are still close to the business. Not so well once they get a ways out. You will be shocked at the bond your executives will build with these folks!

Something to think about. How are your new retirement benefits helping your former employees spend and invest their most precious commodity? Time.

 

Michael J Fox’s Perspective on Co-Workers #WorkHuman

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Michael J. Fox was one of the closing day keynotes at the WorkHuman conference this year, and he killed it like you expect. One of the key takeaways I took from his talk was in regards to all those people you work with on a day to day basis.

Mike Fox laid out two things you should think about when you think about how you interact with your co-workers:

1. Enjoy the people you work with for what they can positively contribute to you and your organization.  This is all about focusing on the strengths of those around you. If you constantly focus on what someone can’t do, you make them miserable and you stress yourself out as well.  People perform better when you allow them to do what they’re good at. When you recognize them for what they bring to the organization, not what they don’t bring.

2. If you can’t enjoy the person you work with, be thankful you’re not them. We are all going to have people in our life that we have to work with that we frankly just don’t like. Could be personality, or skills, or attitude, etc. Mike Fox said you can still find a positive out of this by focusing on the fact you’re grateful that you don’t have their challenges, and by helping those people be the best version of themselves.

I love this philosophy!

Mike Fox was very big on this concept that judging others will get you nowhere. It’s such a big part of culture. I know I do some this myself, and it’s not something I’m ever proud of. The reality is judging others says more about your inadequacies than it does about the persons you are judging. It was a great reminder.

It was a great reminder. In HR and TA we tend to believe ‘judging’ is part of our job description, but it’s not. The best HR and TA Pros I know don’t judge candidates or employees but find what is most useful of those individuals and try and put those people in positions to be successful.

Finally, Mike spoke about fear. Fear others have when they look at him. They look at him expecting to find fear in him and instead see their own fear in his eyes. That statement made me pause. He’s not fearful of his situation. He’s happy life gave him this enormous platform to change lives.

Perspective. We shouldn’t assume we know others based on our own beliefs and fears. Here’s a guy who is facing an uncertain future, but he’s embraced the joy of living one day at a time. The real secret, he didn’t share, is we all are facing life one day at time, he’s just figured it out way before us!