Category Archives: Motivation

Do You Pay Your Employees More for Referring Black People?

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I know a ton of HR Pros right now who have been charged by their organizations to go out and “Diversify” their workforce.  By “Diversify”, I’m not talking about diversity of thought, but to recruit a more diverse workforce in terms of ethnic, gender and racial diversity.  Clearly by bringing in more individuals from underrepresented groups in your workforce, you’ll expand the “thought diversification”. But, for those HR Pros in the trenches and sitting in conference rooms with executives behind closed doors, diversification of thought isn’t the issue being discussed.

So, I have some assumptions I want to lay out before I go any further:

1. Referred employees make the best hires. (workforce studies frequently list employee referrals as the highest quality hires across all industries and positions)

2. ERPs (Employee Referral Programs) are the major tool used to get employee referrals by HR Pros.

3. A diverse workforce will perform better in many complex circumstances, then a homogeneous workforce will.

4. Diversity departments, is you’re lucky enough, or big enough, to have one in your organization, traditionally tend to do a weak job at “recruiting” diversity candidates (there more concerned about getting the Cinco De Mayo Taco Bar scheduled, MLK Celebrations, etc.)

Now, keeping in mind the above assumptions, what do you think is the best way to recruit diversity candidates to your organization?

I’ve yet to find a company willing to go as far as to “Pay More” for a black engineer referral vs. a white engineer referral.  Can you imagine how that would play out in your organization!?  But behind the scenes in HR Department across the world, this exact thing is happening in a number of ways.

First, what is your cost of hire for diverse candidates versus non-diverse candidates? Do you even measure that? Why not!?  I’ll tell you why, it’s very hard to justify why you are paying two, three and even four times more for a diversity candidate, with the same skill sets, versus a non-diverse candidate in most technical and medical recruiting environments.  Second, how many diversity recruitment events do you go to versus non-specific diversity recruitment events?  In organizations who are really pushing diversification of workforce, I find that this ratio is usually 2 to 1.

So, you will easily spend more resources of your organization to become more diversified, but you won’t reward your employees for helping you get reach your goals?  I find this somewhat ironic. You will pay Joe, one of your best engineers, $2000 for any referral, but you are unwilling to pay him $4000 for referring his black engineer friends from his former company.  Yet, you’ll go out and spend $50,000 attending diversity recruiting job fairs and events all over the country trying to get the same person, when you know the best investment of your resources would be to put up a poster in your hallways saying “Wanted Black Engineers $4000 Reward!”.

Here’s why you don’t do this.

Most organizations do a terrible job at communicating the importance of having a diverse workforce, and that to get to an ideal state, sometimes it means the organization might have to hire a female, or an Asian, or an African American, or an Hispanic, over a similarly qualified white male, to ensure the organization is reaching their highest potential.   Work group performance by diversity is easily measured and reported to employees, to demonstrate diversity successes, but we rarely do it, to help us explain why we do what we are doing in talent selection.

What do we need to do? Stop treating our employees like they won’t get it, start educating them beyond the politically correct version of Diversity, and start educating them on the performance increases we get with a diversified workforce.  Then it might not seem so unheard of to pay more to an employee for referring a diverse candidate!

 

Talent Acquisition’s 2032 Nightmare

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According to a recent USA Today article the U.S. birthrate is in sharp decline and is at its lowest levels in the past 25 years.   Here’s probably a few facts you don’t know:

– Projected 2013 birthrate in the U.S. is estimated to be 1.86

– Birthrate needed to maintain a population over a 20 year period is 2.1

Why should this concern you?

There are a number of reasons and one might be that you need as many young people as old for the simple fact of having enough young people to take care of your older population.  If you turn that equation upside down (Taiwan 1.1 or Portugal 1.3) you have a society full of older people and not enough young people to fill the jobs needed to keep running your society.

The U.S. has 5 Million jobs left unfilled because of lack of skilled employees, today. Imagine if you now have millions of less workers to even choose from, and, by the way, skilled workers aren’t coming from other countries because their societies are growing and need them.  That is what our country’s employment picture will look like in 2032.  This will be a HR/Recruiting nightmare for those young HR/Talent Pros starting out their careers in the next 10 to 15 years.

Being the Futurist that I am, I’ve already provided a solution to this problem back in 2011 over at Fistful of Talent. Should You Encourage Your Employees To Have Babies, check it out. Basically my advice remains the same, as U.S. employers we need to create a positive, encouraging environment for our employees, with family-friendly policies that make our employees feel like starting a family is a good thing, and that if they do start a family their job and ability to get a promotion won’t be compromised.  This is not the case as many U.S. employers right now, for both men and women in the workforce.

As HR Pros and organizations we tend to think this isn’t our issue.  It will take care of itself, but as we look at countries with low birthrates, the issue doesn’t take care of itself and those countries have a worker crisis going on right now.   We need to change our ways right now.  We need to be family friendly employers. We need to, as HR Pros, be concerned and find solutions for our employees around daycare, flexible schedules and other practices that will help our employees with families.   I know it sounds a bit the-sky-is-fallingish, but the numbers don’t lie we are headed for some of the hardest hiring this country has ever seen.

One solution I’ve thought of, that I didn’t bring up in 2011, is baby sign-on bonuses!  We do it for college students. I think we start doing for babies of our best employees.  I mean if parents can arrange their kids marriage, what stops us from arranging their first job?  Nothing! That’s what.  Imagine how happy your employees would be to cash a $20,000 check to help with baby expenses for the simple task of forcing their kid to come to work with your company upon college graduation.  It seems so simple! I’m not quite sure why no one has started this yet…

You Wouldn’t Even Hire Your Own Mom

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I had a conversation recently with a friend about how hard it is to work and be a Mom.  Just to be a clear, I’m not a Mom.  I hire Moms. In fact I love hiring Moms, they work their asses off.

I know this because I was raised by a single mother.

I remember my Mom having to pick where we would go buy our groceries based on how long it had been since she bounced a check at that store. I remember her handing me items off the belt to return because they wouldn’t take her check and we only had enough cash for a few items. I remember pouring water into my bowl of generic Fruit Loops because we didn’t have enough money to buy milk that week.

My Mom started her own business, paid her own mortgage and raised two kids. It wasn’t perfect, but we made it. Those experiences shape a kid for life. It makes you appreciate what you have, when you know you can live with much less.  My Mom got hugely successful after I got out of college and my kids only know her as the grandma that has so much.  I can’t even describe to them the struggle, they have no concept.

I have zero tolerance for hiring managers who don’t want to hire moms because they might have to stay home with a sick kid, or they might want to take an early lunch to catch fifteen minutes of fourth grade play at school during the day.  Both men and women, hiring managers, have told me they don’t like to hire moms.  This doesn’t sit well with me.

The Moms I hire are some of the strongest employees I have.  They come to work, which for many is a refuge of quiet and clean, and do work that is usually less hard than the other jobs they still have to perform that day and night.  They rarely complain, and usually are much better to put issues into perspective and not freak out.

When I look at my own ‘tough’ days I try and remember that most of my day is done, while theres won’t be until their head hits the pillow. Old people and Moms are the most disrespected of the working class.  They are the most underutilized workers of our generation.  A woman takes a few years off to raise a kid and somehow she’s now worthless and has no skills.

I don’t even want to write this post because I feel like I’m giving away a recipe to a secret sauce.  All these national recruiting companies are hiring the youngest, prettiest college grads they can find to work for them, and they mostly fail in the recruiting industry. Moms find this industry rather easy as comparable to what they are use to doing.

The recruiting secret sauce, main ingredient = moms.

Watered Downed Feedback is Killing America

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I said this before, but you don’t want to hear it.  No one cares about what you have to say, unless it’s telling them how good they are.

People can’t handle critical feedback, unless it’s set up in a mechanism where they expect it and desire it.  That’s the crux, hardly anyone has that mechanism and while most people tell you they want critical feedback they don’t have the makeup to handle it.

Here are the types of “critical” feedback people can handle:

“You’re doing a good job, would love it if you could get that big project off the ground. That would really help us out!”

Here’s what you really want to say, critically, but can’t:

“You do good at things I tell you to do, and all basic day to day duties of the job. I need more from this position and from you, and I’m willing to help get you there. I need someone who can take a project from scratch and kill it, without me having to babysit the entire thing. You’re not doing that, and that’s what I really need you to do. Are you willing do that?” 

Same message, right?  You do some stuff good, but one critical aspect of the job is not getting done. The problem is, the first level feedback is given 99.9% of the time, because managers and leaders know if you deliver the second level, that person will be destroyed!

They’ll think you think they suck, and they’ll start looking for a job.  When in reality, you were just trying to give them legitimate feedback. Real feedback. Something that would actually help them reach expectations.

So, how do you get to a point to be able to deliver ‘real’ feedback?

It’s starts with your hiring process. In the interview process you need to set people up to understand that your organization delivers real feedback, and they must be able to accept critical feedback and not crumble.  This is a team, it’s about getting better, not hurt egos.  Half will crumble in the interview, which is a good thing, you don’t want them anyway.

For those that you think have the self-insight enough to handle it, you need to do it before hire. Give them the real feedback from their interview, and see how they reply, how they interact.  This will show you what you can expect from them when they get this level of feedback as an employee.

For the employees already working, you need to start by showing them and giving them examples of what true feedback looks like. You need to coach and train your leaders on how to deliver this, on an ongoing basis.  You then need to have coaches and mentors sit in with all leaders when they begin to deliver this feedback.

Part of your leader training is to show them how to accept feedback from their teams as well. If you want to dish it out, you have to accept it as well. Training and coaching employees on how to ‘manage up’ is key to making this successful. This isn’t about blowing people up. It’s about delivering true feedback to help them get better, and person accepting and receiving this information under that assumption. We want you to be the best you, you can be.

All this takes work and time. The organizations that can do this win the culture war, because all the people working for you will know they won’t get this anywhere else!

Discount Employee

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No, I didn’t make another mistake and mean to title this “Employee Discount”, but you were totally in your right to think I would make a mistake!

We discount our employees.  We do this in a number of ways:

1. Experience.  The ten year employee is always looked at less than a new employee coming in with ten years of experience.

2. Opinions. The long term employee’s opinion gets lost to the new voice, because we’ve heard the old employees opinion before. It doesn’t, necessarily, become less valid, but we treat it as such.

3.  Value.  We tend to pay same level experience internal employees less than we pay someone coming from the outside with the same experience, education, etc. This ‘discount’ is well known in the industry.  Hometown discount. They’ve been here forever. They aren’t going anywhere. Why pay them more competitively?

 There is one more way you are currently discounting your employees, Candidate Experience.

Candidate experience is really sexy right now in HR and Talent Acquisition.  It’s all the buzz! Everyone is concentrating on making their candidate experience better.

You know why?  It’s fuzzy metrics.  While you can get ‘real’ measures and metrics from your Candidate Experience, it’s not really, real.  Candidates want a job from you.  When you ask them about their experience they inflate what they really think because they want a job from you.  When you ask them after the entire experience is over, two things happen, first, they either got the job (in which you’ll get good measures) or second, they didn’t get the job and still want one (in which you’ll get good measures).

We love good measures in HR and Talent Acquisition.

We hate measures that make us work, like employee engagement.  It’s easier and more rewarding to spend money and energy and Candidate Experience, than Employee Engagement. Employee engagement is hard. As soon as we fix the stuff from the last survey, the employee expect more! You know who doesn’t expect more? Candidates.

The ironic part of all of this is the easiest and best way to have great candidate experience is to not have to hire.Spend more resources on Employee Engagement, and you won’t have to spend more resources on Candidate Experience.

Chicken or the egg. Discounted Employees. You are discounting your employees in favor of candidates, and you don’t even realize it.

The Difference Between Performance and Potential: A 9-Box Primer for Smart HR Pros

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If you’re like everyone else in the free world, March brings a little bit of a grind.  The hope and promise of the new year has settled into a familiar routine, and you need something fresh to keep you interested at work as a high-end HR pro, right?

Of course you do – that’s why Fistful of Talent is back with a webinar that’s designed only for the real players in HR who like to think long and hard about talent/performance in the companies they serve.  Join us on Wednesday, March 25th at 2pm EST for The Difference Between Performance and Potential: A 9-Box Primer for Smart HR Pros and we’ll show you how to take the next step in your performance management platform by sharing the following goodies:

—A rundown of how smart companies create 2-dimensional performance management systems using performance vs potential, and how that approach sets the table for a host of talent management activities using something called the 9-Box Grid.

—A deep dive into the differences between performance vs potential in any company, including a roadmap for how any company just getting started with performance vs potential can begin building the process to consider both inside their organization.

–We’ll break up the seriousness of the topic by considering where Individual Members of the Jackson Family, the 3 Versions of Van Halen and Husbands/Boyfriends of the Kardashians fall on the performance vs potential scale.  You know, just to help you relate.  And to stop taking ourselves too seriously.

–Since most of you have more experience with performance than with potential, we’ll share some thoughts and data related to common traps and derailers when you build out your definition of potential at your company (hint – the more you tie it to what it REALLY takes to be successful at your company across all positions, the better off you are)

-We’ll wrap up our time together by sharing a list of 5 Things You Can Do From a Talent Management Perspective Once You’ve Launched Performance Vs. Potential/The 9-Box.  Hint – All of the things we’ll share make you more strategic and less transactional as an HR pro, and they let you have high level conversations about talent with the leaders of your company.

You’ve been aware of the ying/yang relationship between performance and potential for years – why wouldn’t you want to help your company get started to understand the same set of truths?  Join us on Wednesday, March 25th at 2pm EST for The Difference Between Performance and Potential: A 9-Box Primer for Smart HR Pros and we’ll give you a great roadmap to refreshing how your company views performance and talent.

REGISTER NOW

The Real Reason for Long Term Unemployed

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In 1979 America had a major energy crisis, mostly blamed on the Iranian government reducing exports and inflating oil prices. This caused the country to go into a prolonged recession.  Our own government made this worse, by trying to help, in changing monetary policy, which knowingly drove up inflation to incredible levels.

The early 1980’s recession caused many people out of jobs, and many were unemployed for a long period.  Long term unemployed isn’t new to our country.  There is one major difference between the early 1980’s and today.

The internet.

From the New York Times:

“technology has made unemployment less lonely. Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University, argues that the Internet allows men to entertain themselves and find friends and sexual partners at a much lower cost than did previous generations.”

You see in 1980 when a man was unemployed he had nothing to do but sit and think about being unemployed.  He could tinker around the house, but eventually that list of “To Dos” got done, and all you had to keep you company was the endless thought of “I’m unemployed”.

Today, you have an endless thought of “well, only one more click” which sends you down a rabbit hole you won’t come out of for hours!

Like most Republicans, I’m just going to blame the internet for this problem.

I remember my Dad forcing me out of the house to find a job.  I had to physically walk into a location to request an application, fill it out, hand it back to the manager, and see what happens next.  I also had to walk to school, in the snow, uphill, both ways.

We all know, now, no one walks in an employer and applies.  We sit at home and apply to five thousand jobs and get around four thousand five hundred email do not reply ‘we received your application’ responses (500 companies still haven’t figured out that reply functionality on their ATS).

I would love a study of the long term unemployed that would ask that one question:

“How many times have you physically gone to a place of employment and applied in person for a position?”

I would guess that number would be very low.  I’m not saying that just doing this would solve long term unemployment.  It might help some individuals get a job.  I’m saying the internet makes it too easy for you to stay unemployed.

Turn off House of Cards on Netflix.  Take a shower. Get a new haircut. Put one some clean clothes and let’s go visit some people. It’s hard to do, which means not many are doing it, which means you will have an advantage over almost everyone.  The internet won’t solve your problem. In fact, it’s probably making your problem worse.

No One Is Waiting To Discover You

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I’m a recruiter.  I search for talent every day.  Basically, I’m never not on the outlook for talent.  Of course I’m doing this at work, but I also do it while shopping, while eating, while I’m at the movies, while I’m on vacation, etc.

You see, I never know when I’m going to discover a talented person and have the exact right opportunity, with the exact right company and it all fits together.

But, if you’re waiting for me, to discover you, you’ll be waiting forever.

I don’t discover anyone who isn’t working to be discovered.   I’m not knocking on closed doors where it looks like no one is home.  It’s like trick or treating, I’m only going to the houses with the lights on.

I hear from a lot of people who are willing to change jobs, or are open to new opportunities.  Unfortunately, almost all of these people are waiting to be discovered.  They aren’t actively doing anything to show me who they are and why I should be looking for them.

Their argument is they don’t want their current employer to know they’re looking.  My argument back is that isn’t the best way to be discovered anyway!  Hiring managers love passive candidates, people who aren’t looking.  You can be a passively-active candidate without floating your resume all over God’s green earth and changing your LinkedIn headline to “Now Open to New Opportunities!”

Get active in your industry.  Get active in the city and community you want to live.  Let your personal network know you would be open to something great, and by-the-way this is what I think something great would look like.

We are coming into a decade where there will be more jobs than qualified people.  You can have some great options if people are aware of who you are.  Just don’t think there is some magical fairy that will discover you sitting at your desk doing your normal job in the third row, second cube, fifth floor on the seventh building in the office park, the world doesn’t work that way. This isn’t Hollywood, this is main street.

 

There is No Kill Switch On Awesome!

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Happy Monday Friends!

Let’s make this week completely Awesome!

Spring is upon us! (well, some of us)

There is no better time to be alive! Well, I hear the sixties were pretty great, and the fifties, possibly the twenties…anywho…

Remember –

No kill switch

 

What awesome stuff are you going to do this week?

 

Covering Up a Career Hickey

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I had a person work for me at past job in HR.  She performed the HR cardinal sin of sins, she shared personal, confidential information with an employee outside of HR.  My problem was, this person was a high performer, an outstanding employee, she had a frustrating, weak moment, and did something you just can’t do in a HR position.  This is what we call a Career Hickey. Sometimes you can survive these hickeys and cover them up, and continue to work as normal.  Many time you can’t.

So now, this Hi-Po has a huge Hickey.  Interestingly though, this Hickey can’t be seen when you look at their resume or interview them in person, but it’s a Hickey they can’t get rid of.  So, barring a life-turtleneck how does one cover this puppy up?

It’s interesting because I think that probably the best of us have a hickey or two that we would rather not have our current or future employer know about.  Sometimes they’re big-giant-in-the-back-of-a-Chevy-17-year-old-I-will-love-you-forever hickeys and sometimes they’re just oops-I-lingered-a-little-too-long type of hickeys. Either way, I would rather not expose my hickeys and have to worry about how this will impact the rest of my professional life. And here’s where most people drive themselves crazy.

As HR Pros I think it’s important for us to be able to help our organizations determine the relative value of individuals.  This person was a rock star at ABC company, did something wrong, and couldn’t maintain that position any longer with ABC because of said incident, and lost their job. Now we have a chance to pick up a Rock Star (and probably for a discount).

The question you have to ask is not could we live with this person if they did the same thing here?  Because that really isn’t the question, you already have that answer is “No.”  The question is: do we feel this person learned from said wrong doing and is there any risk of them doing it again?  You might come to the conclusion, “yes, they’ve learned, and yes, there is potential they might do it again” (let’s face it, if they did it once, they’ve shown they can do it, so there’s always a risk), but it’s a risk we are willing to take.

So how does someone come back from a transgression at work? The answer is that they have some help.  Eventually, someone is going to ask the question: “why aren’t you with ABC Company anymore?”  They’ll give you the canned answer they’ve been developing since the moment they lost their job. If you’re a good interviewer, you won’t buy the first answer (I mean really – so you decided it was better off not to have a job – is what you’re telling me?!) and you will dig to see the hickey.  Hickeys are funny in that you really can’t take your eyes off of them, but for those who can get by the hickeys, you might just find a great talent who is grateful for the second chance.

But, you also might find someone who just likes being in the back of that Chevy and getting Hickeys. You’re the HR Pro though and that’s really why your company pays your salary – to mitigate risk vs. the quality of talent your organization needs to succeed. So, you have to ask yourself, can you live with a Hickey?