Category Archives: Money Grab

The Worst Holiday Gifts You Can Give Your Employees

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It’s usually HR’s job to come up with the annual employee gift. Most companies are lame and will do the exact same thing every year. If they don’t give a turkey on Thanksgiving, they’ll definitely give out turkeys at Christmas. If they did give a turkey at Thanksgiving, you’ll likely get a ham or a fruit cake for Christmas.

Can I just say Christmas, instead of the “holiday season” or list all the possible options? My family is Jewish, but we get it, almost no company will ever recognize Chanukah, and if they do, it’s usually and insulting, “Oh, isn’t that the Jewish Christmas?!” Ugh. Most of the American workforce follows some Christian-based religion that celebrates Christmas, so it’s just easier to play along with the majority.

At some point, usually right around the pagan holiday of Halloween, someone in HR will raise the question to leadership, “Hey, what are we doing this year for ‘Christmas’ for the employees?”  What they really are asking is, “How much money are we spending per employee for some gift that looks more expensive than what it really is?”  Depending on the organization, it’s a wide range!

Here are the worst holiday gift ideas to give your employees:

  • Company Logo Portfolio – you know those fake leather bound binders with a legal pad inside. Twenty years ago those were so hot! Now, they’re sad. If you give this out as a gift you should be shot. “Oh, great, thanks, a pad of paper I can’t wait to take a picture of this and post it on my Snap making fun of the lame company I work for!”
  • Company Logo Bag – Any bag really. Duffle. Messenger. Backpack. The only time this isn’t lame is when it’s a really nice bag. Meaning the bag, minus your stupid logo, better cost at least $100 per bag. Your $12 limit per employee just makes any bag you choose, sad. Oh, it’s a Herschel bag, okay, you’re good, send me one to!
  • Any Company Logo Item Your CEO Wouldn’t Buy For Themselves – Let’s face it no one wants a crappy polo shirt, or cheap hoodie, or water bottle made in China. If your leadership team wouldn’t buy this on their own and use it, don’t buy it for your employees. If your CEO is a cheap SOB, ignore what I said above and just skip logo items altogether!
  • Any Mass Pre-packaged Food Items – You know what really sucks? Getting a gift basket of elf-sized trial-sized food items made to look gourmet that were probably made seventeen months ago.
  • A Charitable Gift in “My” Name – I love being charitable. I hate when some tries to be charitable on my behalf. You don’t know what I support! I might hate sick puppies and I don’t want money going to them. That’s not your call. My favorite charity is my kid’s college fund! Are you giving me money for that?

Employee gift giving, especially the bigger your organization is, is a tough game.  You don’t want to be cheap, but if you have 10,000 employees, that one endeavor becomes super expensive! The best thing to do is just stop it all together!

You go through one negative year of people complaining they didn’t get their lead-based painted candy corporate logo candy dish, then the next year no one remembers. Instead, let your hiring managers throw potluck lunches and have some fun. People will remember those, have more fun, and they might actually interact with each other!

 

 

The Newest HR Certification on the Market! Get it Now!

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If you read my post yesterday on the frustration HR pros and leaders have in deciding between getting their HRCI certification and/or their SHRM certification, you’ll see why I decided to write this!

I’ve officially decided to launch my own HR certification! This will put the rest the unanswered question of, “Which HR Certification Should I Get?” You’ll get mine fool!

Let me lay out my certification designation and marketing position for HR Newest (and Hottest) Professional Certification!

Introducing The HR Kingdom! Where you can now all become HR Queens and Kings!  I mean don’t you already feel like the Queen of HR!? Now you can officially be the Queen of HR, with my certification. Here’s out you get yours:

The HR Kingdom designation certification:

Step 1 – Send me $350 dollars if your female and $500 if your male. If you’re Transgender, you can pick whichever one you self-identify with, or have both, I don’t care, just send the check. It’s less for females because they get paid less. Once we fix this, I’ll charge them the same as males.

Step 2– You will then have a live video Skype call with a member of my court. After this call is completed you’ll be given one of a number of designations as follows:

 – Queen or King of HR – Senior level HR Pro/Leader who ‘gets it’. You know what the heck you’re doing in HR and you’re also not afraid to plan the company picnic and tell the CEO they’re full of shit. You’re a change leader, a silo breaker, and process be damned you get the job done!

– Princess or Prince of HR – HR Pro/Leader who is will eventually get it, but you’re too green to get most of it, but you’re on your way. Most likely you’re a millennial who thinks they get it, but you’ve only been in HR for five minutes and have no freaking idea what you’re talking about.

– Fool of HR – A member of my court has figured out you’re basically working in HR, but you have no freaking clue what the hell you’re doing. You’re basically a fool trying fool everyone you actually know what you’re doing, but we know better.

Step 3 – I’ll send you your official “Crown” to worn anytime you’re working in an official capacity of HR. You’ll also get to officially use the ‘crown’ emoji behind your name on your resume, LinkedIn profile, on your license plate, tattoos, etc. If you’re a “Princess” you’ll get a tiara, if you’re a “Fool” you’ll get one of those funny hats.

Step 4 – You must now officially recognize those other members in the Kingdom by their official designations. So, if you run into another Queen of HR, the official greeting would be, “Hello, your Majesty”, if it’s a fool, “move aside fool!”

I don’t know much, but I know a hell of a lot of HR ladies who will want to be Queens and Princesses of HR! Now that’s marketing your certification to your audience! Give them what they want. Give them something special. Give them royalty!

If you want to be a part of the HR Kingdom, it’s really simple, just send me some cash fools!

Officially Announcing My Candidacy for the 2020 Presidential Election #ACatInEveryPot

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Apparently, we will now campaign for four years to become the President of the United States for four years. Makes sense. I like the Canadian system of campaigning way better than what we have here! 90 days or less and we’re done! Doesn’t that sound like a smart law?

Until then, I’ll have to live with what we have. So, since I’m a U.S. born citizen, over the age of 35, and I would prefer to run under a third party as neither the Republicans or Democrats come close to meeting my needs, I’m officially running under the HR Party!

If I know anything, I know HR loves a good party!

Here is my platform, as of right now, but there’s a good chance I will change often depending at which conference I’m at and what part of the country I’m in at the time:

  • The only way you can now vote for any office is to first fill out a change of address form, completely (even if you haven’t recently changed your address), in black or navy blue ink, and you also must have completed your annual open enrollment.
  • Wine and Chocolate will no longer be taxed, and companies selling these products in the United States must sell them at cost. That should get me at least 51% of the popular vote!
  • By law, you will now not be allowed to talk to anyone before 9am on Monday mornings at your workplace.
  • If you miss an interview due to “car trouble” you will be publicly hanged. This is the single most overused excuse for missing an interview, get more creative or die.
  • If you are a no-call, no-show for an interview, or your first day of work, you will be deported to Siberia or Fargo (they’re basically the same).
  • Grammatical errors on resumes will now cost you a hand. You can pick which hand. I actually think this is dumb, but I need to pander to my electorate.
  • By law, you will no longer be able to call in sick for work on Mondays or Fridays. Because we know you’re lying.
  • Organizations caught paying less to women, for the same position, same skills, will be forced to fire every man that works for them.
  • All colleges will now cost the exact same amount. $10,000 per year for full tuition and books. Living expenses depends on where you can get in – i.e., it costs more to go to college in New York then Omaha. Private or Public. You still have to get accepted based on their admission policies.
  • Cats and dogs will now be allowed in all workplaces where there is not a health concern. No, you can’t bring your pot belly pig, or your snake, or your fish. Cats and dogs, we’re in America.
  • You will not be able to manage other people until you have worked for a minimum of five years in real jobs. No, going to school that mommy paid for and working four hours per week in the library doesn’t count as work.
  • We will now have CEO pay be directly paid in proportion to that of the average worker salary of the companies they lead. That proportion will be 25 times the salary of your employees. If your average salary is $45,000 for employees, the CEO can make $1,125,000. Don’t worry the 95% of white guys in those roles will be just fine. The extra corporate profit will be paid to the shareholders and employees in equal amounts.

I think that’s enough to get started. The HR Party will be huge! What do you think HR Pros? What platform items would you add?

 

Notes to HR Tech Vendors – #10 – Your Real Competition

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I’ve done a few presentations titled something like, “HR Tech Buyers Guide”, “How to Buy HR Tech”, etc. The presentation is designed for HR and TA practitioners to help them become better buyers of HR Tech. To understand the crap that HR and TA Tech vendors do and say to get you to buy stuff you might not need, want, or will use.

The interesting thing about these presentations is that half the audience turns out to be the actual vendors themselves wanting to hear what it is I’m telling the real HR and TA leaders! It’s smart for the vendors. It helps make the better sellers as well. Well, at least some that actually listen!

Based on these interactions I decided to build a series of what has come out of interactions to the vendors themselves, aptly named “Notes to HR Tech Vendors”. Look I don’t alway have to be creative! Enjoy!

#10 – Your Real Competition

Unless you’re buying some giant watered-down enterprise level HRIS or ATS/Talent Suite you almost never have competition!

Yes, you read that correctly. 90% of HR Tech vendors have “NO” competition! But, you believe the opposite.

Here’s the deal. HR and TA Tech buyers are fairly naive to the industry. It’s not our full-time job to track every new ATS that is being launched. We’re just trying to get people hired and stop people from quitting. Takes up about 99.9% of our job! So, when it’s time to buy new Tech we usually buy the first thing we’re sold!

The competition you face is not your real competitors. The competition you face is a “no sale”.

Almost all HR Tech buyers will buy your product, or they won’t buy anything. Primarily because they don’t even know you have competition. Well, they didn’t until you actually told them! “Hey, we’re the #1 CRM on the market, so much better than #2, #3 and #4.” What? There is more than one CRM!?

If you’re Smashfly (a CRM Tech) almost every single sale is going to be a “Yes” or a “No, we’ve decided we don’t need this right now”. It’s almost never “hey, we’ve decided to buy Clinch, or Avature, or Ascendify, or Talemetry, or Beamery, or”…you get the picture!

Almost never!

Your real competition is you. It’s your ability to sell your solution to a buyer that has some sort of pain around HR or TA. It’s shocking at how often this fails. I mean what can go wrong when you throw a 15-year-old on the phone with a twenty year HR vet on the other end, telling them how to fix her shop!?

And you think I exaggerate on the age! Almost every single HR and TA Tech sales person I speak is under the age of 30 and most have never worked a day in HR or TA. This leads to a ton of “no sales”.  If you can’t tell me how your solution is going to solve my pain, in my language, I’m probably not buying.

HR and TA Tech vendors, your competition isn’t the problem. Your technology isn’t the problem (it’s usually really awesome). Your sales strategy is killing you. The cute, little, naive babies selling your products is the problem. They don’t know me. They don’t know my pain. They don’t speak my language.

Your real competition is you.

The Cost of a New Hire is $1000-$5000!?

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Ryan Holmes, the CEO at HootSuite, recently posted an article over at LinkedIn. Ryan is, of course, an “Influencer” for LinkedIn, because he’s a CEO and because he works for a cool brand like Hootsuite. Who cares if he knows what he’s talking about, he’s from Hootsuite, muthfucka!! He must be influential!

Anywho.

Ryan was actually talking about Google’s “bungee” program (see if you’re influential you talk about Google!) and how millennials only care about being developed. Because if we know anything we know young people are great judges of what they actually want. So, Ryan and Hootsuite are actually coming up with their own copycat program and calling it “stretch”.

This program basically allows Hootsuite employees to try out other roles within Hootsuite one day per week, and if it goes well to eventually into that role full time. The basis of the program being that “great employees will be great employees in any role, given the change”.

But, one other big thing jumped out from the post. Remember this is a CEO of a major company. He based all of this program on cost of turnover and believes his cost of turnover is $5000 per employee leaving! $5000!? Now, if you spent 17 seconds in Talent Acquisition you know there is no way $5000 covers the cost of a top employee, probably not even a crappy employee.

SHRM, and other organizations, continually throw numbers at HR and TA that say they believe the cost of turnover is usually 1 to 1.5 times the salary of the person leaving. Do you see the problem with the HR math we have?

CEO believes that it cost $5000 to replace an IT Developer in your company making $85,000. You believe is costs $85,000-125,000 to replace that person. THIS is a major problem and disconnect!

It would be easy for me to say, “well Ryan just pulled some bad data from some crappy content put together by a TA tech vendor to help shape their own story”, but it’s truly the reality for most executives. This is why I constantly caution TA pros and leaders to stop using the 1-1.5 times metric and start asking your executives what they think it is.

In my experience, what I find is most executives, for a professional position will usually give you a number around $10,000. The biggest miss of executives is they never calculate the revenue and profit a great employee produces versus a bad employee or having that position left open. This is where the SHRM number comes from.

This is problematic because most executives won’t tie revenue numbers to someone who’s not in sales, wrongly, since everyone in your organization has an impact on revenue and profit. So, you can fight this battle, which you’ll mostly lose, or you can just go with what they believe and build your story from there.

$5,000-$10,000 per lost employee aren’t small numbers, it’s still significant dollars to work with as a TA leader, and you’ll get better buy-in from CEOs like Ryan!

 

Should CEOs make 276 Times More Than You?

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Check out this chart from Business Insider:

Screen Shot 2016-08-15 at 3.28.08 PMBasically, this chart is showing you how much more your CEO makes than the average worker at your company, assuming you work for one of the 350 largest companies in the United States.

So, let’s put this into real numbers:

The average worker makes around:  $45,000.

That means the CEO makes: $12,420,000.

I think most people feel that disparity is too much. I put it in the context of professional athletes. Should LeBron James get $33,000,000 per year to play basketball for the Cleveland Cavaliers?

We tend to think LeBron shouldn’t get paid $33 Million per year, but at the same time were alright with it because well he wins games. But somehow we don’t believe Indra Nooyi, the CEO of PepsiCo, should earn $22,000,000 per year like she did last year. Why is that?

Oh wait, would you feel better if I put one of those old white guy CEOs compensation number up? Would that make it easier for you to hate?

I find it interesting that for most of the modern era (prior to 1980) CEOs made roughly 25 times more than the average worker. In our example above that would then look like this:

Average worker: $45,000

CEO: $1,125,000

Yeah, this still sucks, right?

So, what should the figure be? How much more should a CEO make than the average worker? Does 10 times seem right ($450,000)?

I’m a Moneyball guy. I have a hard time believing any CEO is truly worth 276 times more than an average worker, but if that’s what the market bears, more power to them! I’m also a Capitalist!

I do believe, though, that all of these organizations could fire their CEOs at 276 times pay, hire someone else at half that pay and they would have the same or better results across the board. 50% pay cut, same performance. So, why wouldn’t they do this?

Organizational dynamics are built to continue this behavior of over-paying. At some point around 1980, someone let the cat out of the bag and leaders have been pushing the envelope ever since! Think about how this all goes down. A leader goes to the board of directors and says, “Look we need better talent at the C-level to support me.” The board supports, raises get put in, this pushes up against the CEO.

Well, now we have compression, time to move the CEO up. The cycle continues, again, and again…. It becomes a leadership arms race! The board feels like they are in no win situation. If the company is doing well, of course, they vote yes. If the company is doing bad, well, we need better, so you get another yes vote.

No one is willing to just stop it. To say, you know what, ten times or twenty-five times, is plenty. We’ll find great talent at that amount. I’ve met great CEOs and awful CEOs of very large companies. All made outrageous money and their performance had very little to do with their compensation.

What do you think? How much more should a CEO get paid over the average worker?

Student Loan Debt will end up being an Employer Problem

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Take a look at this chart:

Screen Shot 2016-08-10 at 2.05.48 PMBasically, what this chart is showing you is that America has a massive student loan debt problem.  Want to know what the next ‘housing crisis’ will be?  It’s right here in this chart!

The average student is now leaving college with over $35,000 in debt. This has a trickle down effect that college and universities could care less about, the government could care less about, and every Presidential candidate could truly care less about.

I have friends in High Education who will be pissed I say that colleges don’t care about this problem, but they don’t. They’re in the business of empire building. Listen to Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast “Revisionist History“. He does a three-part series on how broken higher education is, and there is no easy way out!

Don’t kid yourself, Hill or Trump, isn’t going to help those in debt. They might try to solve this issue for future students, but those poor saps who already signed loan agreements will be on their own! You can take that to the bank.

So, this becomes your problem, the organizations, and companies that hire all these graduates with all this debt.

How is it your problem? 

1. Debt causes stress.

2. Stress causes problems – lack of productivity is just one that will directly impact all organizations.

3. You have to solve the biggest problems in your organization.

4. This will soon become your biggest issue.

5. Financial wellness programs aren’t equipped to handle a problem of this magnitude!

What should you do?

Do you really want to know? This might not be very popular!

– Stop requiring a college degree for employment in your organization. Companies and organizations have actually contributed to this problem. It’s the college or prison mentality we’ve forced upon kids. “You must go to college or you’ll have no options!” Well, except for almost any position we hire for, but we’re lazy and like to use an arbitrary piece of paper as a screening tool.

– Develop ‘Apprentice’ programs for a modern age. Why don’t we have Sales Apprentice Programs? Bright-eyed-bushy-tailed kids right out of high school who still believe they can be anybody. Why aren’t we teaching them ourselves?  No, let’s send them to college to learn how to drink beer first, then we’ll teach them on our own. You could do the same thing for almost any role you have – many engineering/technical roles included!

– Develop programs that assist your employees in paying down this debt faster and with less interest than they currently have. Yes, there is a retention aspect to this. Yes, this will require some service as a payback. Yes, this will help your employees be less stressed!

All of these cost money to organizations and companies, but you need to make a choice. Do you want to control that cost yourself, or do you want to deal with in the future for everyone you hire? It used to be that companies invested into their workforce. Then we got lazy and tried to throw this onto high ed. Turns out that doesn’t work too well.

Get ready kids! Employees with big giant monthly debt payments are coming your way and they won’t be very happy when the reality of what they did comes crashing down upon them. Have fun with that!

 

The Grass Isn’t Always Greener

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This is HR’s go-to advice for employees who put in their two-week notice, especially if that employee is heading to a competitor:

“Just remember! The grass isn’t always greener!” 

HR is mostly right. I’d say here’s the actual breakdown of ‘greenest’:

  • 50% is actually about the same shade of green. You’re moving to just move. You’ll find the job, the people, the money, everything is almost the same. The only change is the name and maybe the location by a bit.
  • 30% is going to be a nice shade of light brown, meaning the grass isn’t green at all, it’s dead! HR wants to believe this number is higher but it’s not, but it’s high enough to give some folks some pause before making such a big decision.
  • 10% is way greener! Like green M&M green. Dream job green! Everything is better and you’re so happy you made the move. You found your dream job!
  • 10% isn’t grass at all. Someone replaced the grass with some other material, like in Phoenix where grass can’t grow so they pave the front yard and paint it green, or just put in rock and cactus. This is completely something you didn’t expect. You were hoping for a better job, and you got something that isn’t better but not worse, it’s not even the job you expected, so you can’t really compare.

So, you have about a 10% chance of getting what you think you’re getting. Not good odds, but like I said, most employees way overthink their odds on this and probably believe they have a 70-90% of bettering themselves when they move. Most will just stay the same or get slightly worse.

Why do we believe moving is better?

1. You’re being sold. Sold by a recruiter and a hiring manager that you’ll be moving from a trailer park to Disney World. You really, really want to believe that’s true, so you buy!

2. You over-value that what we don’t know, over what we already have. This happens in so many areas of our life. Relationships. Jobs. Table at a restaurant.

3. You over-value what others have, over what you have. Think about this for a minute. You’re so eager to get out of this job, yet others are so eager to get this job. What does that say? You’re brilliant and everyone else is an idiot? Probably not. The truth is usually somewhere in the middle.

Everyone keeps telling me all these ‘new’ young workers just want to jump from job to job. They don’t have loyalty, etc. The reality is much less about their desire to move, and more about them being more naive to the realities of changing jobs.  We all loved changing jobs until it backfires and you leave something good, for something crappy.

Once that happens, you’re less likely to change jobs the rest of your career, even if you’re in a bad job! Don’t underestimate what you currently have. It’s probably way better than you’re making it out to be, and the new gig isn’t as good as it sounds. That’s not sexy, that’s just reality.

 

Why Doesn’t Corporate Talent Acquisition Change The Way They Pay Recruiters?

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For the most part, Corporate Recruiters are paid a salary. That salary ranges widely from organization to organization, industry, function and location. I’ve seen corporate recruiters who make $40,000 and ones that make $150,000. The $150K corporate recruiters are overpaid, let me just throw that out there right off the bat!

Agency recruiters are usually paid some salary and a combination of commission and bonus. The average goal for an agency recruiter compensation model is 1/3 salary, and 2/3’s bonus and commission. So, if your base agency salary is $30K, the hope is you’ll get to $60K through commission and bonus. It takes some time to get to $90K-ish total, but it’s fairly common for agency recruiters to make six figures. Again, this depends on what kind of agency, location, commission structure, etc.

On average, you’ll see more six figure recruiters working on the agency side, then you’ll see on the corporate side, by a wide margin.

So, are agency recruiters worth more than corporate recruiters?

Worth is defined by those paying! What I’ll say to this question is agency recruiters are more likely to ‘prove’ their worth than you’ll see on the corporate side. Which begs the question why has corporate Talent Acquisition not adapted their pay structure to something similar to that of a recruitment agency?

I’ve run both corporate TA shops and agency shops. I can tell you, realistically, there is no reason, that makes sense, not to at least test different pay structures on the corporate side! My goal in was always how do I get my corporate recruiters to be 2/3’s salary and 1/3 bonus. I wanted to make sure there was some performance-based compensation as part of their total compensation.

Here are some reasons I ran into each time I changed the pay structure of corporate recruiters”

  • “If you change the pay structure the best recruiters will quit!”
  • “We can’t change the salary structure, it’s the law!”
  • “Paying bonuses to recruiters in a corporate setting isn’t fair to the other people in HR!”
  • “The executives will never agree to performance-based pay in a non-sales role!”
  • “We want our recruiters to be hiring manager focused and paying bonuses would change that!”

All of these excuses are complete B.S.!

I did have Recruiters quit everything I came into an organization, but not because of pay. They quit because I made them actually recruit for the first time in their life! They had to pick up a phone, they had hard measures and weekly and monthly goals, they quit because they weren’t recruiters, they were administrators. But, being paid like they were recruiters.

Corporate TA Leaders don’t change their pay structure because they don’t know what to change it to, and change is scary!

I get it. It was the first time I did it as well, but in the long run, we had higher performing recruiters, better hiring manager satisfaction and we flat out performed better as a department, as compared to what we did previously.  Here are some tips to making this change:

– Make sure your high performing recruiters can actually make more money in the new model.

– Make sure low performers make less in the new model.

– Set black and white measurable goals before changing pay, and work with these goals for a while before aligning them with compensation.

– Be flexible to change. The first time I did this I found major holes and had to make some immediate changes that were fair to the recruiters and the organization.

– Communicate with your team and executives through this process.

– Have written outcomes you want to see from this change and watch those metrics closely.

– Paying per hire is never a bad thing, just make sure the pay matches the effort of the hire. Don’t pay the same bonus for hiring an admin as you do to hire a Java Developer. I tried to equalize this by the time and effort it took to fill each position. If it took 1/10 the time and effort, the bonus was 1/10 the amount of a full effort position. Again, you’ll have to test and adjust this for your organization. Don’t write it down in stone, to start!

– You’ll never really have to have a performance management conversation again! Oh, you want to make more money….

Recruiting, even in a corporate setting, is a sales type role and should be paid as such. There is no reason why you can’t have a more effective pay structure in your corporate TA department.

Want some help in getting this off the ground?  Contact me!

 

 

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!