Category Archives: Life Lessons

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.

Sometimes You Just Love Someone At First Sight

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We aren’t supposed to be those people in HR.  We aren’t supposed to fall in love with a candidate the moment we see them. We tell ourselves we’re better than the rest, than our hiring managers.

The problem is, we do. We do fall in love. In fact, it happens all the time.

For the most part when you go to hire and you start interviewing, you either fall in love with a candidate or you don’t. There really isn’t any in between.  If you don’t fall in love, you never really feel comfortable making an offer, and if you do, you feel it’s probably going to eventually fail.

I’m not saying that those you fall in love with succeed all the time, because they don’t.  Without the love feeling, though, you never feel confident in the hire.

Here’s where I really start to think we might just be over-thinking this entire hiring thing.

If I fall in love with a candidate in the first 2 minutes, why do I need to go on with the interview process?  Do you ever fall out of love with a candidate, you fell in love with at first sight? I haven’t.  If I loved them in two minutes, I loved them after 2 hours of interviewing.  Sometimes you just know.

This doesn’t work for every position. Falling in love works best when you’re really hiring for organizational fit.  When you have a position that you could teach to almost anyone willing to learn, good work ethic, etc. If the primary goal to achieving a great hire is organizational fit, falling in love at first site usually works pretty good on the selection scale.

None of us in Talent Acquisition and HR ever want this to get out. It goes against our secret handshake to make hiring really difficult in our organizations. But, when you really go back and analyze your best hires, almost all of them will have the ‘love’ factor!

I believe in two things when it comes to hiring:

1. Do I really love this person as a hire?  If I can’t immediately answer that question, I need to keep looking.

2. Does this person scare the shit out of me?  Meaning, is this person so talented that eventually they’ll take my job! I hope so. I want to be scared, it makes me work harder. I want people who are better than me. Most people do the opposite. If the candidate is better than you, they pass, because they lack the confidence on how to handle that situation.

If I can answer ‘Yes’ to both of the above questions, I’m going to make some really strong hires.

 

Ladies, would you prefer not negotiating your salary?

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An article recently written on NPR speaks to a ‘new’ trend in organizational compensation.  What’s that trend? Apparently, companies are now not negotiating new hire or promotional salaries.  Basically, here’s what we pay for this position, take it or leave it.

Do you believe this would work?

Here is more from the article:

When it comes to negotiating salaries, the research is pretty clear: women are less assertive than men. It’s one reason women who start their careers with a narrower pay gap see it widen over time.

Carnegie Mellon economics professor Linda Babcock, who studies the gender pay gap, says men are four times more likely to negotiate their pay. That keeps women at a disadvantage, though they’re not always aware of it.

“The standard now is that people don’t really know what each other earns, that some people negotiate and some people don’t, and so there’s tremendous inequities in salary,” Babcock says.

Here’s what I’ll say, Yes, we have inequities in salaries.  Having non-negotiable salaries can help these inequities, but this isn’t a solution. The reality is organizations need flexibility to negotiate salary, especially when it comes to attracting hard-to-find talent. Organizations that take a hard stance on this, will lose in the talent attraction game.

What organizations need to do is have a policy on making quicker market compensation moves when they begin hiring in individuals, male or female, at higher rates than someone who might have started a few months prior. Most organizations are very weak on this practice, which causes most of the inequity.

You hire someone last year at $50K, and this year you hired someone into the same position, doing the same job, with a very similar resume at $58K. You now need to go back to your employee making $50K and give them an increase to $58K.  This hurts, but it needs to be done. That’s why it is critical for your talent acquisition team to have great negotiation skills.

It’s not a $8K increase to your budget, it’s a $16K increase to your budget. Now, think about in terms of a company that has hundreds, or thousands of employees in the same situation.  That $8K dollar negotiation can turn into hundred’s of thousands of dollars across the organization in market increases.

This is why most companies turn a blind-eye to market increases, and why so many organizations have pay inequalities. If females are less likely to negotiate higher salaries, and your organizaitons is going to ignore the difference, you’re going to have a growing problem that only gets worse the longer you ignore it.

I recently had a situation with a Fortune 500 client you completely gets this, and refuses to let it becomes a problem. We had a female candidate interview and get an offer. She wanted $47K. She was way under market for the position, and for the company. They knew she only wanted $47K, and they came back and paid her $63K! That was the value of her position to the organization and what similar people in her role were going to make, with her experience.

Like I said, this isn’t a salary negotiation issue. This is a do-you-want-to-do-the-right-thing organizational issue.

What do you think?

HR’s Work Uniform

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I got put on to an article recently about a female Art Director who decided to where the exact same outfit to work everyday.  She’s been doing it for the last three years:

“I have no clue how the idea of a work uniform came to me, but soon, the solution to my woes came in the form of 15 silk white shirts and a few black trousers. For a little personal detail, I remembered my mother loved to put bows in my hair as kid, so I chose to add a custom-made black leather rosette around my neck. Done. During the colder months, I also top my look off with a black blazer. I shopped all the pieces in one day. It burned a hole in my wallet to say the least, but in the long run, it has saved me—and will continue to save me—more money than I could imagine.

To state the obvious, a work uniform is not an original idea. There’s a group of people that have embraced this way of dressing for years—they call it a suit. For men, it’s a very common approach, even mandatory in most professions. Nevertheless, I received a lot of mixed reactions for usurping this idea for myself. Immediately, people started asking for a motive behind my new look: “Why do you do this? Is it a bet?” When I get those questions I can’t help but retort, “Have you ever set up a bill for online auto-pay? Did it feel good to have one less thing to deal with every month?”

I love the idea.

I recently went on a diet. I’m not a big dieter type.  But I’m completely comfortable with eating the same thing, every day, every meal. Give me a plan, and I’ll follow it.  For breakfast I have a banana and two eggs, mid-morning snack is a protein bar, salad with grilled chicken and fruit for lunch, Greek yogurt in the afternoon and a piece of fruit, for dinner it’s fish/chicken/steak, brown rice, veggie combo of some kind. I’m down about 15 pounds. I’ve been doing it for about six weeks or so. It’s easy.  I don’t have to think about what I’m going to eat, and I like what I’m eating.

I could so easily wear the same thing to work every single day. I basically do anyway for the most part, dark dress slacks and button down shirt. It would be even easier to just keep it all the same.

I wonder what a good HR uniform would be?  Here’s my suggestion:

For the Men of HR: 

– Dress khakis (not the cotton type, the poly blend type. Cotton wrinkles to easily, and the cotton ones that don’t are Dockers and no one wants to see those.)

– White button down or predominantly white patterned button down (In HR you want to wear white, it symbolizes you’re on the right side of things. Pressed. Crisp.)

– Sweater vest  (Sweater vest screams secure, conservative decision making and trust. HR in a nutshell.)

– Wingtips (Brown, not black. Brown is soft and comfortable. Black is cold and hard.)

– Socks (Fun colors and patterns. This speaks to the culture you want, but aren’t willing to go all out for.)

For the Ladies of HR: 

– Dress slacks (Black or Navy, no Khaki for the ladies. Get some pants with some structure to them, no pseudo yoga pants, no one wants to see the HR lady’s cookie – shout out to my girl Mer! – and make sure they’re long enough.)

– White open collar shirt, sligh v-neck (You want classy, not sexy. Long sleeve or 3/4 sleeve. Spend some money so it’s not see through, or get white camis to go under.)

– Lightweight cardigan sweater (Color to match the season, plain, no patterns or picture of cats. This adds softness and approachability.)

– High heels to match the pants (Not hooker high, appropriately high.)

I would totally trust these two HR Pros above!

What do you think? What would you like for your daily uniform if you were going to wear the exact same thing to work every single day?

8 Hacks Benefit Managers Can Do to Raise Employee Engagement

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Tomorrow (Tuesday April 21st) at 2pm I’m hosting a free SHRM webinar (Link to register below) on how you can use your normal, boring employee benefits communications to drive better employee engagement. Well, let me take that back, it won’t be your normal, boring communications, it will be newer, better employee communications!

This won’t be your normal SHRM webinar, because it’s me and the company sponsoring the webinar is called Jellyvision (and their benefit communication technology called ALEX)! This will be fun!

The days of the low-strategy, low-impact benefits communication plan are over. Today’s HR professionals can no longer approach benefits communication as a chore that must get done as quickly as possible.

Smart HR pros know that strong benefits communication strategies drive employee engagement levels through the roof. In this lively program, you’ll learn that it’s not company picnics and spiffy logo polo shirts that make people love their jobs but smart, strategic benefits communication.

What do you know? The benefits team just got elevated to strategic employee engagement driver number one!

What can you expect to hear? 

1. What and how can Leaders in your organization do to aid your benefit communications? Simple tips to get them involved without them lifting a finger!

2. Research shows that 3/4 of your employees don’t understand their benefits, BUT 3/4 also don’t want more Benefit Communications! So, what are you supposed to do!?!

3. Research also shows that the higher percentage of employees to actually understand their benefits, the higher the organizations overall employee engagement is.  I’m going to walk you through some easy to do hacks that can help you, and show you some technology that is transforming how great companies are turning employee benefit communication upside-down!

Click Here to Register! 

Surprise! You’re an HR Manager! Now what?

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It’s graduation season and soon many new HR brothers and sisters will be entering into their first real HR gigs. Many will be titled, “HR Manager”, even without one day of experience.  That’s because in many organizations, HR Manager is the only HR position they have, and they’ll gladly take a young, fresh new HR grad.

The tendency for new managers, especially HR Managers thrust into a generalist role, is to get buried with tasks.  We all know the drill, you get started at the new company, and by day 3 you already have so many projects, improvements, process changes, etc. that need to be made you determine you probably have about 18 months worth of work.

Whether you’re a new manager, or seasoned HR Pro, we tend to forget the above concepts from time-to-time and get bogged down in the everyday details within HR Departments.  So, for the new HR Managers (and maybe some seasoned vets) I wanted to give you 3 tasks that should be accomplished everyday as a HR Manager who wants to be strategic and add value to your organization:

1. Keep Track of the Score,

2. Find Better Talent,

3. Be a Relationship Bridge.

Keeping track of the score, means you must create and track metrics, for your people practices, that have bottom-line impact to your organization. Communicate these constantly and educate your organization on how they can impact these results.

Finding better talent for your organization is really the only reason the HR Department exists.  If you did only this all day, every day, your company would be better for it.  No, having a better dress code policy isn’t going to make you world class. In the end, talent wins.

The single largest factor to inefficiency isn’t bad processes, it’s bad, or non-existent, relationships. It is your job to develop your leaders, and part of that is helping them understand the value of each part of the organization and getting them to dance with each other.  Being a bridge, and bringing leaders together, with understanding will have the greatest impact on efficiency.

Leaders understanding, and actually knowing, each others pain will solve most organizational problems. Why? Because you hire great talent, and great talent with good relationships will move mountains and get you to world class.

Never underestimate the power of relationships (good and bad).

Show me a leader who claims they can “work around” someone (meaning they don’t get along with that person), and I’ll show you a below average leader who needs to leave your organization.  New, and seasoned, HR Managers underestimate the leverage they have at helping organizational efficiency through better relationships.

Good Luck new HR Managers!

Compensation 701 – A Master’s Course

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In terms of one part of your corporate Compensation Philosophy you can be a Pay Follower, a Pay Leader or Market Rate.

You never hear Pay Leaders complain about Turnover…

You always her Pay Followers complain about how Pay Leaders can actually pay that much…

Those who Pay at the Market always talk about how money isn’t that important…

HR and Compensation Pros will always talk about how it’s not about how much someone makes, it’s about the total compensation package.  Ironically, those Best Companies To Work for tend to have the highest total compensation packages and be Pay Leaders.  It’s a vicious cycle to get the best talent.

If your a pay follower you will never have the best talent.  If you pay at market, you will never have the best talent for long.  If you’re a Pay Leader you’ll have the ability to attract the best talent and the resources to hook them, but you still have to have the culture and leadership to keep the long term.

This is everything I know about compensation after 20 years of working in HR.

What have I learned?

I always try and work for Pay Leaders, otherwise you end up chasing your tail a lot within the HR world.

Consider yourself graduated.

HR Worst Enemy

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I’ve been speaking a few local SHRM events and some corporate events and I’m always amazed to hear about all of the Enemies that HR has!  You have employees, and hiring managers, and the EEOC, and employment attorneys, and staffing firms, and insurance firms, and HR software providers – I mean, if I hadn’t been in HR, I would think that everyone is against HR!

It feels like that some days, doesn’t it?

HR’s real worst enemy, though, doesn’t get that without your organizations service or product being successful – no one is successful.

HR’s worst enemy doesn’t get that more hurdles to jump through, means less time for operations to focus on the real business at hand.

HR’s worst enemy doesn’t get that treating everyone the same way, doesn’t create a high performance culture.

HR’s worst enemy doesn’t get that having employees fill out open enrollment paperwork just so you have a document to prove what they filled out, spends more resources then it saves.

HR’s worst enemy doesn’t get that adding 5 additional steps to a process doesn’t make it simpler, it makes it more complex.

HR’s worst enemy doesn’t get that not leaving your department to go out an build relationships in other departments isn’t a good thing.

HR’s worst enemy doesn’t that eliminating all risk isn’t something that is possible – nor should it be a goal.

HR’s worst enemy…is itself.

How To Tell Someone They Suck

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Got a question recently from a newbie HR/Talent Pro about how do you tell someone they just aren’t good enough for the position you have, without hurting their feelings?  Great question, and one that we all run into frequently.  Here’s the story:

“Mr. Jones (I’ve changed the name to protect the guilty) won’t stop bugging me, he emails his resume to me ‘every’ day!”  We know Mr. Jones, because Mr. Jones use to work for us, and it didn’t turn out so well.  Mr. Jones was “laid off” back in the recession when we got rid of our dead wood. Now, Mr. Jones wants to come back for another position we have.  The problem with Mr. Jones isn’t skill related, it’s personality related, he’s annoying.  He was annoying to everyone who ever came into contact with, but his manager never coached him on this.”

So, the BIG question. How do you get Mr. Jones to stop bugging you?  This happens to every single HR/Talent pro I know eventually.

Here are the steps I use:

1. Tell Them!

That’s it, no more steps.

Here’s our problem as HR/Talent Pros, we never want to burn a bridge.  “Well, Tim, you don’t know where he might go, who might hire him, I don’t want to ruin my reputation”  Bullshit.  You’re being conflict avoidant, and if you look at your last performance review, I bet under “opportunities” is probably says something about avoiding conflict or not confronting issues head on.

I had a very good HR mentor once tell me, “it’s best to deliver them that gift, then to allow them to walk around not knowing”.  Once you start being straightforward you’ll be amazed at how many people will say, “No one has ever told me that!”  That’s the problem, no one ever tells them the truth, thus they keep doing the wrong thing, instead of trying to fix what is wrong.

How do you get an annoying candidate to stop bugging you?  You tell them exactly, very specifically, very calmly, with no ill intent, “I want to give you a gift.  You might not see it as a gift right now, but I hope in time you’ll understand it to be a very valuable gift.  I (don’t use “we” or “us” or “the company – you’re avoiding again by using those), I think you have a very bad personality flaw that comes across annoying to me, and from the feedback I have received, to those you work with.  If this does not change, you will probably struggle to find a job and keep a job.”

OUCH! That hurt right?  But, read it again, was there anything mean or untrue in the statement? If this person actually listens to the statement and acts on it, will they be better for it?  You can change the reason for whatever issue the person might have, maybe it’s hygiene, maybe it’s a crazy laugh, who knows, but the basic message stays the same.  You need to change, or I never want to speak to you again.

It’s hard for new HR/Talent pros to understand this, because 99% have been taught to be nice, thoughtful people and not to be rude.  This sounds a bit rude.  In reality, I think it’s rude to string a person along and not care enough about them to actually tell them what is wrong and to help them.  Stop telling candidates your blow off lines and start telling candidates the truth.  At the very least, you’ll have more time on your hands to talk to the candidates you really want to speak to!

The True Value of Working for a Crappy Company

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As some of you may have realized from recent posts (Wanted: People Who Aren’t Stupid), I’ve been interviewing candidates recently for the position of Technical Recruiter working for my company HRU. I love interviewing because each time I interview I think I’ve discovered a better way to do it, or something new I should be looking for, and this most recent round of interviews is no different.

Like most HR/Talent Pros I’m always interested in quality work/co-op/internship experience. Let’s face it, it’s been drilled into us, past performance/actions will predict future performance/actions.  So, we tend to get excited over seeing a candidate that has experience from a great company or competitor and we’re intrigued to know how the other side lives and our inquisitive nature begs us to dig in.

What I’ve found over the past 20 years of interviewing is that while I love talking to people that worked at really great companies, I hire more people that have worked at really bad companies.  You see, while you learn some really good stuff working for great companies, I think people actually learn more working for really crappy companies!

Working at a really great companies gives you an opportunity to work in “Utopia”. You get to see how things are suppose to work, how people are suppose to work together, how it a perfect world it all fits together.  The reality is, we don’t work Utopia (at least the majority of us) we work in organizations that are less than perfect, and some of us actually work in down right horrible companies. Those who work in horrible companies and survive, tend to better hires. They come with battle scars and street smarts.

So, why everyone wants to get out of really bad companies (and I don’t blame them) there is actually a few things you learn from those experiences:

1. Leadership isn’t a necessity to run a profitable company. I’ve seen some very profitable companies that had really bad leadership.   Conversely, I’ve worked for some companies that had great people leaders and failed to make money. Leadership doesn’t equal profits.

2. Great people sometimes work a really crappy companies.  Don’t equate crappy company with crappy talent.  Sometimes you can find some real gems in the dump. I talk with idiots, every day, that work for really great brands. Blind squirrels…

3. Hard work is relative.  I find people who work at really bad companies, tend to appreciate hard work better than those who work a really great companies with great balance.  If all you’ve ever known is long hours and management that doesn’t care you have a family, seeing the other side gives you an appreciation that is immeasurable.

4. Not having the resources to do the job, doesn’t mean you can’t do the job. Working for a crappy company in a crappy job tends to make you more creative, because you probably won’t have what you need to do the job properly, so you find ways.

5. Long lasting peer relationships come through adversity.  You can make life-long work friends at a crappy job who you’ll keep in contact and be able to leverage as you move on in your careers.  And, here’s what each of you will think about the other: “That person can work in the shit!”; “That person is tough and get’s things done”; “That person is someone I want on my team, when I get to build a team”.

We all know the bad companies in our industries and markets.  Don’t discount candidates who have spent time with those companies. We were all at some point needing a job, a first experience, a shot at a promotion or more money, etc., and took a shot at a company we thought we could change or make a difference.  I love people who worked for bad companies, in bad jobs with bad management, because they wear it like a badge of honor!