Category Archives: Life Lessons

The Only Way To Hire A Recruiter

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I’m always on the lookout for a silver bullet to make great recruiter hires! But, I haven’t found one, yet!

I’ve met and been around thousands of recruiters in my career, and most have a few similar traits that make them successful at recruiting, think:

  • Self Motivated
  • Ability to drag information out of an individual
  • No phone fear
  • Quick minded
  • Connector of people
  • Etc.

The reality is, though, no one has really found the secret sauce to hiring great ‘potential’ recruiters.   I say potential because it’s rare I that I hire experienced recruiters.  It’s not that I have a problem with experienced recruiters…wait, I probably do have a problem with experienced recruiters.  Here’s my deal, if you’re a really good recruiter, I shouldn’t be able to afford you. If I can afford you, you’re not a good recruiter.  I like to grow my own.  No recruiting experience, come on in and we’ll show you the ropes.  By the time you end up being really good, I’ll be paying you really well and everyone is happy.

That still leaves me with a better way to find those who, potentially, could be really good at recruiting. There isn’t any ‘recruiter starter’ program at the local community college, and while Enterprise Rent A Car kids have been a good breeding ground, that isn’t perfect either.  Sure, Allegis/Aerotek has used the Fraternity and Sorority route for years, and that has done well for them, but I want something that is more of a sure thing.

And, I think I might have it.

For my next Recruiter hire, I’m going to have the candidates actually recruit someone for their interview process.  Game show style!  Bring in three people we like from a personality standpoint, give them a requisition on a need we have with all the details, and send them home.  First one to come back with a valid candidate that we would want to hire, get’s the job!

I know, I know – you can thank me later – I solved it!

Think about it for a minute.  If the candidate truly wants to recruit they should be able to fumble there way through one requisition to find some candidates that are relatively close.  The reality is, I want to see how they go about it, I want to talk to them once they find the person and ask them a million questions about how they did it, what they would do different, etc. I want to know that they actually want to do this.  My guess is 2/3 of the candidates won’t complete the task and I’m completely fine with that, because I don’t them, and they probably don’t want me!

What do you think?  Would you take on the task?

3 Ways To Make Your Office Productive During March Madness

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For those that know me, I’m a huge basketball fan.  Pro, college, AAU, high school, hell, if you really dig into my past you would probably find me hanging out at some playground breaking down the defense effort of a pickup game between grade school kids.  So, when March Madness time comes around each year I’m like many of your employees.  I’m trying to find the best ways to work and watch basketball, or at the very least stay up on my brackets and see who is getting upset!

With all the hype over the past few years about lost productivity, do to March Madness, in the workplace.  I felt it was my duty to provide HR Pros with some helpful tips and tricks to get the your staff to highly productive during this time of year.  Here’s my ideas:

1. Put up TVs throughout the office.  Let’s face it, you really only have one or two hoops junkies in the office, and those folks usually spend vacation time to ensure they don’t miss a minute.  Everyone else just wants to see scores and highlights.  They’re a casual fan.  They’re willing to work a perfectly normal day, and will probably be just a productive, if not more, with the TVs steaming all the games in the background.  Plus, if you get a close game or big upset, you’ll get some team excitement in the air.  This also stops most of your staff trying to stream the games on their desktops for the entire afternoon.

2. Call off work those afternoons.  Let’s face it, March Madness is pretty close to a national holiday as we will ever get.  Doesn’t matter if you’re female or male, young or old, what religion you are, we all love the drama and excitement of March Madness.  Just close the office.  Make a deal with your staff to reach certain goals and if they’re met, take them to the local watering hole yourself and have some fun with it.  Employees like to rally around a fun idea.  You don’t have to make everything fun, all the time, but once in a while it helps to lift productivity.

3. Shut off all access.  Yep, you read that correctly. Have IT shut down all access to anything related to March Madness.  Threaten to fire any employee caught checking scores on their smart phone, or calling a friend to see how it’s going.  Fear!  Fear is a great short-term lifter of productivity.  Whether we like to admit it, or not, it’s true.  If you went out right now into your office and told the entire staff at the end of the day you’re firing the least productive person, you would see productivity shoot through the roof!  You would also see about half your staff, the half you want to keep, put in their notice over the next 4-6 weeks.

The reality is, most people will do business as usual.  While the CNNs of the world love to point to the millions of dollars American corporations lose during March Madness, it’s no different than so many things that can consume our thoughts in any given day.  I do think HR and leadership, each year, lose out on a great way to have fun and raise engagement during March Madness.  It’s something most of your staff has some interest in, and depending on your city and the schools your employees went to, it can get heightened pretty significantly.

For the record, I’m not picking Michigan State.  I want to with all my might, but I’m nervous that my bracket mojo would work the opposite, so I’ll pick someone else, and feel awesome when Sparty wins and I lose my bracket!

 

Client Respect and Love

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I dropped a vision on my team a couple weeks ago.  I think it’s important for any leader to do this, but it’s also important that it be completely authentic and transparent.  I say ‘dropped’ on my team, because that’s exactly what I did.  I didn’t let anyone know I was ‘working’ on my vision, because I wasn’t.  It came to me.  Like a vision.  It took me about a week to get the thoughts down in my own style, and add a grammatical error or two.

I’m not sharing my vision with you.  It’s for me and my team.

I will share a concept from it.  I want to work with clients who want to work with us.  Not just work with us, but want to partner with us.  Now, I know we throw that word ‘partner’ around a bunch.  My vision of a partner is a client who respects us and loves us.  We have to have both, love and respect, to get to my vision.  Respect isn’t enough.

In HR many times we will say something like “I don’t need that hiring manager to like me, as long as they respect me.”  That’s just a nice way we lie to ourselves that this will be a functional relationship.  It’s not.  You need more than respect, to be wildly successful.  You need Love.

I want love.

I want respect.

I want to work with clients who respect what we bring to them from a skill and support side.  But I also want clients who love us, and we love them.  That I look forward to talking to them, to seeing them, and they feel the same way.  That isn’t easy.  But it is something I think we owe to ourselves.  To work with people we love to work with, whether it’s those sitting next to us as coworkers, or those clients we work with daily.

I don’t care if I was selling staffing solutions, or the cure for cancer, my vision would not change.   I don’t care if I’m running a business or running a department, my vision stays the same.  In HR you have ‘clients’, all those who you support.  Are you trying to get your clients to love and respect you?  If you reach that level, where they do, it will make your job, your life, glorious.

Becoming A Victim Of Can’t

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I spoke in Huntsville, Al this week to a group of around 175 HR and Talent Pros for North Alabama SHRM.  It was a fun group. They had a ton of energy and were willing to put up with me and my fast talking northern ways! My wife told me to be more respectful, than usual, on my way down to Alabama.  She said southern women expected more manners than I was use to!

For those who don’t much about Huntsville it is a big military town, which means most people either work on the base, or work for a contractor supporting one of the many military contracts coming out of the base.  There are literally hundreds of companies in Huntsville that are considered military ‘contractors’.  That’s really just a big fancy term for companies that won a military contract, which is just a scope of work they need to do or deliver to the military.

If you haven’t worked a military contract before, they come with as much red tape and rules as you can expect from the U.S. government.  That becomes a very big problem for HR Pros who love to follow rules!  One thing that was apparent very early into the day was that some Huntsville HR and Talent Pros became very comfortable with saying the following statement:

“We can’t do that, we are a military contractor!”

You can probably guess what my answer was to that!  “Yes, you can! You just have to find a way to do it!”  What they didn’t expect was that my company was also a military contractor, I was going to accept any victim statements.  Yes, you are a military contractor.  Isn’t it great!  Now, let’s find out how we can use Facebook to recruit and find you some really good talent!

But, Tim, OFCCP! OFCCP won’t allow us to social recruit!  Really.  It really says within OFCCP regulations that you can’t recruit on Facebook!?  Well, no, but…you just don’t understand.  Yeah, I understand more than you really know.  I understand it’s going to be hard, but it can be done.  I also understand that it’s really easy to fall the victim and use OFCCP as a crutch to why we can do our job.

I actually spoke to two pros who were going through OFCCP audits.  Scary stuff for any HR or Talent Pro.  But I didn’t even let them use it as a crutch.  I asked them if they would get through it. Yes, was the answer.  Did you get fined? No.  So, now you just have to figure how to make it the sourcing you need to do, work within your OFCCP process.  Not easy. But doable and needed.

The most dangerous thing we’ll ever face in our career is becoming a victim of can’t.   I’m a firm believer you can try to do anything.  We might not succeed, but it shouldn’t stop you from trying.  Things like OFCCP are there to catch bad companies, doing bad things.  I’ve never spoken to a good company, with good people, trying to do the right things, that ever had an issue with OFCCP! Ever!

Go do the right things for your organization, and in the end trust that why you might get audited, you are doing what is right.  That’s ultimately all you really can do.

How to tell your Work Critics to “Suck It”!

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In the corporate world everyone is a critic!  Everyone!  We’ve gotten really good at a learned behavior.  No longer can we just send out a final product the first time. Why?  Because everyone wants to trash it and change it, so it can be this really nice piece of plain old vanilla cake!  Welcome to Corporate America. But you know what? This isn’t new. Critics have been around since Jesus, and critics have been wrong since before Jesus!   I wanted to share with you some famous things that critics got wrong:

Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125, by Ludwig van Beethoven (1824)

What the critics said in 1825: “We find Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony to be precisely one hour and five minutes long; a frightful period indeed, which puts the muscles and lungs of the band, and the patience of the audience to a severe trial…” –The Harmonicon, London, April 1825

Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville (1851)

And the critics response: When Melville died in 1891, Moby-Dickhad moved a grand total of 3,715 copies…in 40 years! The below was typical at the time of the book’s release:

“…an ill-compounded mixture of romance and matter-of-fact. The idea of a connected and collected story has obviously visited and abandoned its writer again and again in the course of composition…Our author must be henceforth numbered in the company of the incorrigibles who occasionally tantalize us with indications of genius, while they constantly summon us to endure monstrosities, carelessnesses, and other such harassing manifestations of bad taste as daring or disordered ingenuity can devise…” -Henry F. Chorley, London Athenaeum, October 25, 1851

Animal Farm, by George Orwell (1945)

What the critics said about the book we all had to read in high school: “It is impossible to sell animal stories in the USA.” –Publisher’s rejection

 

Here’s what I know, true creativity in what we do, does not come from running our ideas through everyone and their brother for approval.  If your organization wants your employees to be truly creative and innovative, stop pushing teams.  Teams don’t make masterpieces. They can do some pretty cool stuff, but pure creativity isn’t one of them.  We push “Team” so hard in HR and in most organizations it sometimes makes you think like this the only way everyone in the world must work, but it’s not.  An HR Pro that can determine the proper work structure throughout their organization is truly valuable.  “Team” isn’t always the answer, and you should have other tools in your toolbox.

 

You hear artist all the time say, “I don’t listen to my critics”. This is valuable in that they know listening to a critic will hurt their art.  Unfortunately, in business, we don’t always have the ability/decision to not listen to our critics (who could be bosses, peers, friends, etc.).  In business telling your critics to “Suck It”, could be a big career derailer!  So, when do we go all “Suck It – It’s my project” in the workplace?

 

First, I would never suggest you approach it beginning with “Suck It”!  While it will get their attention, it will also shut off communication.  I think we all need the ability in our work environment to push back appropriately when you truly know you have something that will make a difference.  But, it’s really about having the conviction to stand behind it and not let it get changed.  That’s your indicator,  “am I willing to put my career/credibility/bank of influence on the line for this idea/project/etc.?” If you are, it’s time to pull out the “Suck It” card and push forward.  For most of us, this might never happen in our work lives.  It’s rare to have to do this, if you find yourself doing it often, you’ve got an interpersonal issue to deal with!

 

I think what we learn over time is that not all of our critics are bad, and some actually might help truly make us better.  The key is to continue to have confidence in what you do, without it, your work critics will make your work life less than artistic.

It’s not a Bromance, It’s a Promance!

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Bromance –

“A bromance is a close non-sexual relationship between two (or more) men, a form of affectional or homosocial intimacy. “

Basically a Bromance is two dudes who really, really like each other, but not in a romantic type of way.   It’s like girls can be ‘besties’ but guys can’t.  So, if guys are ‘besties’ and acting a little to close, they’ll be told they’re having a ‘Bromance’.

Professionally this is called a ‘Promance’.

Promance –

“A promance is close non-sexual relationship between two (or more) coworkers, a form of affectional or homosocial intimacy.”

Basically a Promance is coworkers who are best friends at work, but might not actually be that close outside the work place.  This sometimes has been called ‘Work Wife’ and/or ‘Work Husband’, but it can also between coworkers of the same sex.   The fact is we spend a great deal of time with our coworkers and become very close to many of them.  But we also have life outside of work, sometimes that includes coworkers, sometimes it does not.

Promances allow us to have close relationships with coworkers we actually like.  Promances are what keep coworkers staying at companies, sometimes, far longer than they would have if no promance was in place.  It also causes multiple coworkers to leave, or follow, each other to other companies.  “My promance just got a job at Ford, I’m going to follow her over there, we work great with each other!”

The cool thing about Promances is that they’re really only defined by work hours.  There is no expectation from a promance that you’ll actually communicate outside of work hours, and no one feels slighted by this!  It’s like the relationship you always wished you could have with everyone! “So, you mean like when we’re together we can be totally cool and hangout and just be great, but when we aren’t together neither one of us is going to feel an obligation towards communicating with the other!? Okay, I’m in!”

There is a fine line that you have to be careful with, as Promance can turn into a Bromance if you’re not careful.  It usually starts with happy hour or the company softball team, and quickly begins to spiral out of control.  It’s when boundaries of work hours no longer matter, and you begin to spend non-work hours with your Promance.  Many times this becomes too much.  All of sudden you’ll find yourself sitting on your coach on a Sunday night watching a game and saying things like “okay, I’ll see you in the morning at work” and realizing you’ve never stopped seeing that person, ever!

I love Promances.  I’ve got a wife and three sons, very full out of work life.  Promances are perfect for me.  I can have all of these relationships at work, and go home and not have those relationships interfere with my home relationships.  It’s truly the best of both worlds!