Sure! I can give you my “Free” staffing firm option!

Posted on July 18, 2019 by Tim Sackett

I’ve gotten a chance to work both sides of the fence for an extended period of time in the Talent Acquisition/Recruiting/Staffing game. For ten years I ran corporate talent acquisition shops for some very large organizations. One organization spent over $3M annually on staffing agency fees! Obviously, prior to my getting there!

I’ve spent almost fifteen years on the agency side, sandwiched in between my corporate experience. What I’ve learned along the way is that there isn’t a “free” option when it comes to hiring great talent.

Frequently, I get asked from clients for discounts to my fees on the agency side. I get that. When I was on the corporate side, I would never take an agency’s first offer. Here’s the main problem with all of this:

Corporate talent acquisition pros don’t want any of it. They don’t your 20% direct fee, they don’t want your retained plan, they don’t want your RPO plan. What they want is Free. A free option.

Therein lies everything you need to know about staffing agencies and corporate talent acquisition. One side wants free. One side needs to get paid.

The reality is, even staffing on your own on the corporate side isn’t free. Corporate talent acquisition done right has a ton of costs. Recruitment tools, automation, branding, job boards, applicant tracking, college strategy, recruiter training, and hiring, etc. None of that is free.

All of this, though, should be screaming to the agency folks that something isn’t right. What corporate talent acquisition pros are saying is “we don’t like the options we are getting from agencies”. This should be of serious concern because there are companies trying to design other options for corporate talent acquisition pros. Options where they’ll feel like they are getting the value they want.

These options aren’t free, either, but they are less than all of the traditional options that 99% of staffing agencies are offering.

When I was on the corporate TA side of the desk, here was my decision matrix to when I would use a staffing agency.

This matrix made me feel good about my decision to use an agency:

1. Does my team have the capacity to do this search? If Yes, why would I pay to have this done? If No, the cost is justifiable.

2. Does the agency offer me recruitment expertise and/or pipeline I don’t have on my team? See #1 for Yes and No options.

3. Is it financially feasible for me to add more capacity to my team, as compared to an agency option? This one took some more work. If I had a need for an agency to fill, let’s say, three positions and it was going to cost me $100K, well, obviously I could hire a pretty good recruiter for $100K. But, would I need that Recruiter in year 2, 3, etc.? Adding headcount isn’t a one time cost for an organization.

Ultimately, for me on the corporate side, it was almost always a capacity issue. I had the expertise, but we had bubbles of work I needed extra support with. Too often, I see corporate TA leaders upset over agency spend and it’s based on the fact they don’t have good recruiters on their team, yet they’re unwilling to change this fact. I’ll pay for additional short term capacity. I won’t pay for expertise I should have on my team every day. That becomes my issue!

Corporate TA leaders become frustrated over agency spend because ultimately it’s a reflection on the team they have created.

DisruptHR Detroit 3.0 Speaker Applications Now Being Accepted!

Posted on July 16, 2019 by Tim Sackett

For those who don’t know, I’m involved with DisruptHR Detroit with an amazing team of HR pros and leaders, and we are putting on our 3rd event on Thursday, September 19th at 6 pm.

Great DisruptHR events start with Great content and we are now Accepting Speaker Applications for DisruptHR Detroit 3.0!

Due Date is August 2nd!

Tickets for this event will go on sale on August 5th and we’ll announce the full slate of speakers and the agenda on August 9th.

The location of DisruptHR 3.0 will be downtown Detroit at The Madison. Click through to the DisruptHR Detroit site for more information.

Who makes a Great DisruptHR Speaker?

Anyone with a passion for HR, Recruiting, People and pushing the envelope around what, why and how we do what we do every day in the world of work!

We especially love practitioners of all experience levels. You don’t know have to be a twenty-year vet to be great at DisruptHR! You can be an HR pro in your first year on the job. It’s all about passion and ideas!

So, what makes a great DisruptHR Talk?

It’s 5 minutes – so you better be tight around what your topic and idea is!
20 slides that move every 15 seconds – you don’t control this, we do. So you better practice!
No selling products or services – Yes to selling ideas and passions!
Make us feel something – laugh, cry, anger – have a take and be proud of that take!
We see and feel your passion.

We’ve built DisruptHR Detroit to be a supportive hub of HR and Recruiting. We want people to come and challenge us, but know you’ll be rewarded with an audience that will support you and cheer you on. These talks aren’t easy, and we get that! The audience gets that!

How can you speak at DisruptHR Detroit 3.0?

APPLY to Speak it’s easy! It’s a great development opportunity for those looking to get on stage and have some professional experience speaking. You actually get a professionally produced video of your talk that you can use as evidence of your ability. It’s also a great networking opportunity with the Detroit metro HR and Talent community!

Should You Be Promoted Every 3 Years?

Posted on June 5, 2019 by Tim Sackett

If you didn’t catch it this week, a job board executive came out with how often you should be promoted early in your career. Basically, he said it should be every three years. Do you agree?

Early-career employees should aim to get a promotion around every three years, according to Ian Siegel, CEO of ZipRecruiter. “If you aren’t moving up after three years, there is a problem,” he said.

Let’s say you start your new job right out of college at 22 years old.

First job title (Individual Contributor): HR Generalist

Second job title at 25 years old: Senior HR Generalist

Third job title at 28 years old: HR Manager

Fourth job title at 31 years old: Senior HR Manager

Fifth job title at 34: HR Director

Sixth job title at 37: Sr. HR Director

Seventh job title at 41: Vice President of HR

I’ve told this story before but I had a goal coming out of college that I wanted to be a Vice President by 35 years old. I spent the early part of my career chasing titles. I became a Vice President at 38. Upon becoming a VP at 38 I immediately realized it didn’t matter at all!

Titles are organizational-size specific. If you work for a 250 person company (or a bank or a startup) becoming a VP of whatever probably isn’t too hard. If you work for a company that has 25,000 employees becoming a VP is going to take some time. Also, are you really a Vice President when you have 2 direct reports, or when you are responsible for an organization of hundreds or thousands?

The reality is titles are basically meaningless to everyone except yourself.

I think Ian’s math actually works out for large organizations. If you start working for large companies, the three-year promotional cycle probably works out in most normal economic environments for above average performers who meet the following criteria:

Have the desire to continually move up.
Have the ability and desire o relocate.
Have a specialized skill-set or education.
Have a willingness to go cross-functional and learn all parts of the business.
Have the ability to play the political game.

You don’t get promoted for just showing up and doing the job you were hired to do. Every idiot in the company can do that. Showing up doesn’t make you promotable.

There are probably a few things that can help you move up faster that I think most upwardly mobile professionals don’t know. You need to make your boss know that you want to move up and you’re willing to work with them to make that happen. Working with them doesn’t mean trying to push them out, it means you will work to push them up.

You need to have a developmental plan that your boss, and maybe the boss above them, has signed off on. This plan is your responsibility, not their responsibility. If you think it’s your bosses responsibility to make your development plan and push for your promotion, you’re not someone who should be promoted. Own your own development, with their guidance.

Understand that three years in an average. You will be promoted sometimes in six months and sometimes in six years. In some career paths you’ll be promoted three times in three years, but then not again for nine. The right amount of patience is critical in getting promoted. One of the biggest mistakes I made in my career was jumping companies for a title because I thought my current boss wasn’t going anywhere and three months after I left he was promoted and told me I was in line to take his spot. I loved that job! I had no patience.

Being promoted has nothing to do with time and everything to do with you putting yourself in a position to be promoted.

The Future of Work, is More Work!

Posted on May 29, 2019 by Tim Sackett

I’m sure you’ve read an article or listened to a podcast in recent weeks that had something to do with “the future of work”. It’s a hot topic to talk about, primarily because it’s all just a big fat guess and the best content is content where I just get to tell what I think will happen, but really have no idea for sure.

When I take a look at the HR technology landscape and see the tech that is hitting the market around work and performance, I think the future of work is actually just more work!

When I say ‘more’ work I really mean “More” work! Much of the technology that is being created and launched around HR Technology falls into a few buckets:

How can we make workers more efficient at what they are currently doing?
How can we monitor workers on what they are doing (tracking)?
How can we leverage A.I. to do certain tasks workers are doing right now?

Don’t get me wrong, the technology doesn’t scare me in the least, I think it’s amazing, but the reality is much of it is designed to help us humans reach our full potential. If my couple of decades in HR has taught me anything it’s that very few of us humans want to reach our full potential!

Reaching your full potential means you are working really hard!

I have a great story about working in a union job the summer I first got out of high school. My Dad got me the job working in a grocery warehouse picking orders to be delivered to supermarkets. The warehouse just implemented a new software system that tracked the productivity of each worker.

Basically, I would be given an order and the system had estimated how long that order should take for me to complete. If the order was complex I got more time, it is was simply pulling a full pallet of one type of item, I might only get ten minutes or so to complete, some orders were estimated to take 75+ minutes to complete.

The union had negotiated that I only had to work 77% of the time. Yes, you read that correctly! If you added up all of my order minutes, in theory, to keep my job, I had to be 77% efficient. So, in an eight-hour shift of 480 minutes, once I reached my 369.6 minutes of work, I could actually just stop. In fact, I was encouraged very strongly by my union brothers to stop at the exact point!

Now the “new” computer system didn’t account for extra effort. So, if I had an order that was supposed to take 60 minutes, but I worked really hard and completed it in 45 minutes, I just earned myself an extra 15 minutes. By the end of the summer, I was efficient enough in getting orders completed that I spent about three hours a shift playing cards with my union brothers in the back of the warehouse until my shift was done!

The new HR Technology that is in play right now, based on AI and machine learning, would have made these corrections individually within a few shifts, knowing I could do that work more efficiently than another person and soon my orders would have been adjusted. The technology would have ensured that my ‘extra’ effort turned into my normal effort.

We already know that my warehouse work will be replaced by robots, so my example is already dated. But what about that office job? Will a robot replace you? No, not right away, we are a ways off from that, but that same AI/Machine learning technology will track and measure everything you do and soon you will feel as busy as ever, because ‘down time’ is unproductive time and the tech can compute that!

The future of work is more work.

Hot or Cold? Your Office Temp has Gender Performance Impact!

Posted on May 28, 2019 by Tim Sackett

There’s a new study out that shows that men and women actually perform at different levels based on the temperature of the environment they are in. Can you guess which gender performs better in hot or cold temperatures?

So, the 27-year married man in me had a guess!

My wife loves to sleep with the bedroom ice-cold! There have been many nights, as the dog and I huddle close sharing body heat, that we didn’t think we would make it through the night. The headline the next day would be, “Woman finally has a peaceful night’s sleep as husband and dog freeze to death in the bed beside her!” I kid! Partially!

So, my initial guess was that women perform better in cold temps. I was completely wrong! From the study:

“The authors found that female students generally performed better on math and verbal tests when the room temperature was at the warmer end of the distribution, submitting more correct responses as well as more responses overall. Conversely, male students generally performed better on these tests at lower temperatures – at the warmer end of the temperature distribution, they submitted fewer responses, as well as fewer correct responses. The improved performance of women in response to higher temperature was larger and more precisely estimated than the corresponding decrease in male performance. Temperature did not appear to impact performance on the logic test for either gender.”

So, turns out women and men are different!

But it does beg the question of how do get to an optimal temperature for our office environment when we have both men and women working together?

I’ve worked in organizations where the facilities folks were a bit crazy when it came to temperature. They had one temp and no matter what that was going to be the temp. You weren’t allowed space heaters, or fans (the claim was energy usage), so you would see people wearing coats or have blankets at their desks. Or see people in tank tops because it was so hot!

The reality is we all have preferred temps that will help us perform better and when we think about the employee experience and the physical environment our employees work in, it’s up to us to figure out how to be help them optimize the temperature that’s right for them! This isn’t someone just being a diva, this is science! We want high performance and workers thriving, then the physical temp they are working in matters.

So, what temp do you perform in? Or have you even noticed? Hit me in the comments.

6 Reasons Your Organization is Failing at Recruiting

Posted on May 14, 2019 by Tim Sackett

I’m out in San Francisco this week teaching a class on Talent Acquisition to some great Pros and Leaders who are doing all they can to learn more and help their organization succeed. The class is part of the process for SHRM’s Specialty Credential in Talent Acquisition. Part of the process is two days of deep learning with an ‘expert’ instructor in-person or virtually. Apparently, the expert instructor got hit by a bus, so they tapped me on the shoulder!

The course is designed for corporate HR pros and leaders who want to get better at TA. This is modern material, designed to help individuals begin to build out a modern recruiting practice. It helps build a foundation in the right way on what best practice organizations are doing in their TA shops right now.

I love spending time with HR and TA pros who just want to learn and get better. Who want to help their organizations be better. It might be one of the funniest things I do all year! At the same time, it might be one of the most frustrating because I see and feel their struggles!

What I find is almost all organizations fail at recruiting for basically the same reasons. Here are those reasons:

1. We fail in recruiting because we are trying to be like everyone else and afraid to stand out from the other competitors for talent in our market. Yes, this is mostly employment branding and recruitment marketing, but it speaks to basic risk aversion we struggle to overcome in traditional HR. What I find is most c-suite executives welcome this risk, but no one is giving them options.

2. We are flat out not persistent enough going after the talent we want. Great recruiting is about pursuing great talent. I married way above my pay grade! The only reason I was able to land my wife was that I didn’t give up. We all want to be wanted. Most corporate HR and TA pros give up on pursuing talent because they initially say they aren’t interested. That should just get us going!

3. We aren’t letting potential candidates know who we really are. Guess what, when you come here you’re going to have to work and we don’t allow you to have pet pigs. Sorry. I mean, we’ll still have fun, challenging work and we’ll support the heck out of your development, but this isn’t a playground, this is a business. If that sounds like you, we will love you and you will love us! It’s okay to help some talent self-select out of coming to work for you. I don’t want to attract every candidate. I want to attract candidates who want us and we want them!

4. We hear your advice, but we just suck at actually executing it because we are busy. Too busy to get better. I hear all the time from leaders that they would love to do all this cool stuff, but they just don’t have the time. So, I ask, are you successful? No, we are broken. So, you would rather stay broken then fix your shop? Well, we still have to keep doing what we are doing. No, you don’t. You can stop. That is an actual option if you let everyone know you have a plan and this is the plan to finally get fixed!

5. We fail because we don’t fully believe we are responsible. Ouch, that one hurts me, because I’ve actually been fully in that position. Someone finally gave me the title but somehow I felt like I still wasn’t really in control. Turns out, I was, but if I wasn’t going to take control, others above me were going to, since someone had to. Ugh. Once I took control, everyone around me and above me gave me full support.

6. We haven’t figured out how to use our network for good. I’ve been royally screwed by people that I networked with, only to watch them f@ck me over and take (Hi! Z.A., you prick!). Yes, this happens. I’ve also reached heights in my career that would never be possible if I didn’t have all of you helping me along the way. I see way too many pros scared that if they share, especially locally in their market, someone will steal their great ideas and secret sauce. So, they don’t and they miss out on so much good in the world! Go share, exchange ideas, and keep doing it, especially with those who reciprocate!

To my first SHRM TA Credential SFO class – go out into the world and do better recruiting! Also, don’t hesitate to reach out to me when you need a little help!

What if you just hired without interviewing?

Posted on May 9, 2019 by Tim Sackett

I have this idea floating around in my head that there is this line. The line is where information about a candidate begins to make us less efficient in hiring. Could be too much information or too little information. That’s really the entire crux of our hiring process.

At which point does the amount of information we have on a candidate make us inefficient in hiring?

Seth Godin has a concept call he calls “A/J testing“, instead of what most of us use in business as A/B testing. In A/B testing we test two possible outcomes that we believe to be fairly similar to see which one works best. In Seth’s A/J testing you test two possible outcomes that you believe are very different.

This got me thinking about what if we just didn’t interview. We posted, we sourced, we did some screening, we might even do some assessments, but then we just make an offer and have them show up. That’s our “J test”. We hire ten candidates that way, all for the same job. Then we do our A test as our same old process for another ten candidates.

What do you think your outcomes would be?

Here’s what I think would happen:

A test = same results you have now.

J test = slightly worse results than what you have now, but with an extremely lower time to fill.

In high volume hourly, with moderate to high turnover, the J test, might then play itself out as a better overall result if you are getting people hired faster. If we are truly no better than a coin flip when it comes to interview selection, does the interview really matter, especially in high volume?

This is just one example of a possible J test in recruiting and HR, there could be endless tests. You could J test compensation models, team structures, flexible scheduling, etc.

The key is to every once in while test something that no one else is. That is attempting innovation. That is pushing boundaries.

The First Question Every Leader Needs to Ask Themselves!

Posted on May 2, 2019 by Tim Sackett

I’ve been blogging now for ten years. Writing every day for eight years. If you go around writing and telling people you know something about something, guess what? They’re going to ask you to tell them about something, specifically as it relates to their circumstance.

So, I get asked my advice quite a bit about talent and HR issues people are facing.

There is a bucket of questions I get asked that fall into the same type of category. These questions all have to do with how do we ‘fix’ something that isn’t working well in their HR and/or Talent shops. How do we get more applicants? How do we get managers to develop their people? How do we fix our crazy CEO? Etc.

I used to go right into how I would solve that problem if I was in their shoes. Five-minute solutions! I don’t know anything about you or your situation, but let me drop five minutes of genius on you for asking! It’s consulting at its worst! But it’s fun and engaging for someone who came to see me talk about hugging for an hour.

I’ve begun to change my approach, though, because I knew as they knew, they weren’t going back to their shops and doing what I said. The problem with my five minutes of genius was it was ‘my’ five minutes, not theirs. It was something I could do, but probably not something they could do or would even want to do based on their special circumstances.

Now, I ask this one question: Do you really want to get better?

Right away people will quickly say, “Yes!” Then, there is a pause and explanation, and sometimes from this, we get to a place where they aren’t really sure they really want to get better. That’s powerful. We all believe that ‘getting better’ is the only answer, but it’s not. Sometimes, the ROI isn’t enough to want to get better. Staying the same is actually alright.

We believe we have to fix something and we focus on it, when in reality if it stays the same we’ll be just fine. We’ll go on living and doing great HR work. It just seemed like the next thing to fix, but maybe it actually is fine for now, and let’s focus on something else.

Many times HR and Talent leaders will find that those around them really don’t want to get better, thus they were about to launch into a failing proposition, and a rather huge frustrating experience. Better to probably wait, until everyone really wants to get better and move in that same direction.

So, before you go out to fix the world, your world, ask yourself one very important question: Do you, they, we, really want to get better? I hope you can get a ‘yes’ answer! But if not, the world will still go on, and so will you, and you’ll be just fine!

Do you remember your first time!?

Posted on April 29, 2019 by Tim Sackett

I was twenty-six years old. At the time, I was living in Michigan and working in my first job right out of college. I had been doing pretty well for myself and began moving up in the company.

I had just got put into a position where I had a couple of people reporting to me, and I had to hire a new person to report to me as well. I hired this smart, young person right out of college. Their passion and energy immediately attracted to them.

Oh, wait, you think I’m talking about…

Okay, let me start again. This post isn’t about sex! This post is about my first termination!

Can you remember yours?

In my career, having to terminate individuals are some of my most memorable experiences. I think if you have half a heart, you’re probably the same. When I talk to upcoming HR graduates, I always try and forewarn them about this part of our job.

Terminating employees leads HR pros to heavy drinking or other forms of stress relief. That is a fact.

From time to time I hear HR pros talk boastful about firing someone, and it makes me sick to my stomach. While I’ve had to terminate individuals that clearly deserved it, I never took pleasure in doing it. It’s the one thing that really sucks about having a career in HR. We get to see people at their weakest moments.

Most of us pray that no one ever has to see this side of ourselves. Let alone, be in a position, where you frequently get to see this side of humanity.

When you terminate someone, there is a good chance you’re going to see this person’s biggest fears. I have enough of my own fears. I don’t need to carry around the fears of others!

My first time?

I had to fire the young kid I hired with all the passion and energy, hoping they were going to change the world, fresh out of college. This person just couldn’t come up to speed as a recruiter. It happens. I worked with this person, encouraged them, but eventually this person was ‘dead-employee’ walking.

Their body kept showing up for work, but their mind and heart had given up. No matter how hard they physically worked, it wasn’t going to happen for them. So, I pulled them into the conference room and told them it was time.

No real emotion to make this termination more memorable than any other. The person was upset, and you could see this was not something they had written on their bucket list. They stood up, walked out, and my life went on.

Nine years later, I’m working at Applebee’s in HR. I was responsible for seventy restaurants, and I happen to stroll into one of the locations and there is my first termination working behind the bar! I saw him before he saw me, but once he saw me he froze.

I went over to say ‘hi’, and catch up. It was awkward and clunky, but I’m an HR pro, I was trained to do this. After me letting him go, he bounced around for a few years, and finally decided to go back to school, and had taken the bartender job at Applebee’s to make ends meet.

I saw this person a number of times after, and on one visit, he asked to talk. He said that the day I walked into the Applebee’s, and he learned who I was, in my new position, he assumed I was going to fire him again. I said, “For what?!” He said, “I don’t know, just because.”

It hit me hard. This wasn’t about terminating a poor performer and moving on. This person carried that termination around like a backpack for nine years, and as soon as they saw me, all that fear and feelings of failure flooded back to him.

Welcome to the show kids. Sometimes working in HR sucks.

Are You A Coach in HR?

Posted on April 23, 2019 by Tim Sackett

I read an article in The New Yorker, probably the best article I’ve read in a while, on the importance of “Coaching” by Atul Gawande. Atul is a writer and a surgeon, smart and creative – I should hate him, but he’s so freaking brilliant! From the article:

The concept of a coach is slippery. Coaches are not teachers, but they teach. They’re not your boss—in professional tennis, golf, and skating, the athlete hires and fires the coach—but they can be bossy. They don’t even have to be good at the sport. The famous Olympic gymnastics coach Bela Karolyi couldn’t do a split if his life depended on it. Mainly, they observe, they judge, and they guide.

As an HR Pro, I’ve always believed that HR has the ability to act as “coaches” across all vestiges of our organizations. The problem we run into is this, “You can’t coach me! You don’t know the first thing about Marketing, or Operations, or Accounting.” You’re right, good thing I’m not “teaching” you that! That’s why we hired you. Having a coaching culture in your organization starts during the selection process. Are you hiring people who are open to being coached?

The Tim Sackett Project

TA & HR Expert, Dad, Backup Point Guard on my over 40 men's team

Category Archives: Performance